


Harrington-Wing

by Mel_and_Christy



Series: Harrington-Wing [2]
Category: Gundam Wing, Honor Harrington Series - David Weber
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2013-12-29
Packaged: 2017-12-28 03:42:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/987248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mel_and_Christy/pseuds/Mel_and_Christy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The saga begins! Well, it already began in the bits of backstory we've written up so far, but this is the first bit of the main mass of it... and boy is it ever a mass! It just kept spooling out until we had over 13k words, and I'm not certain whether to be delighted or horrified. ;P</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Delivery

“I’m **so** pleased to finally meet you,” the blonde woman said in emphatic tones as she sat down, dimpling at Solo and Duo impartially. “I’ve wanted to thank you for saving Quatre ever since he told me the story, and of course I’m delighted that he’s now financing you. Piracy is such a terrible thing, and too many people just assume that someone else will take steps.”

“Wow.” Duo blinked at her. “You can make platitudes sound awesome, **and** deliver them with a straight face. How d’you do that?”

Relena blinked back at him, startled, and Quatre choked on a snicker beside her. “I told you they wouldn’t sit still for your blonde airhead act, love.”

“Yes, you did,” she admitted, smile broadening into something less polished and more sincere. “You can’t blame me for trying it, though, can you?”

“Nah,” Duo grinned, leaning back in his chair. “Gotta keep in practice with all your weapons, right?”

“Ooh, you understand!” she exclaimed, batting her eyelashes at him and briefly switching back into the ‘dewy-eyed innocent’ expression she’d started the conversation with. “I like him, Quatre. Can we keep him?”

Quatre was laughing too hard to answer, leaning on the table and reaching for his water glass. Solo lifted one eyebrow, face admirably straight even though Loki seemed to be coughing up a hairball beside him. “I thought you **were** keeping us. Buying us shiny toys and everything.”

“Toys? Keeping us? Don’t tell me we got adopted **again** ,” Duo snickered. “And I’m not calling Q ‘daddy’, all right?”

“Not even ‘sugar daddy’?” Relena inquired sweetly, and Duo cracked up.

“Oh, man, you are totally not the person you play on the vids,” he gasped out, coughing to clear his voice. “Do they give out trophies for that? Best actress in a political role?”

“Unfortunately not,” she said dryly, pouring more water for Quatre. “If anyone figures out that it is an act, you’re automatically disqualified. I wouldn’t mind getting a nice shiny statue, though; when I’m forced to sit in the House of Lords and listen to someone droning on about a topic they patently do **not** understand, I could sit there with a smile on my face thinking about polishing it. Or hitting them with it.”

“Those things are nicely balanced for clubbing, aren’t they?” Solo mused.

“Yes,” Relena agreed, eyes narrowing. “I could get in such a nice swing at… ah… certain people who shall remain nameless. _*ahem*_ Let’s not talk about politics. Do the new ships meet all your expectations?”

“Now there’s a subject change I like,” Duo grinned, raising his glass to her. “They’re gorgeous; I think Hilde is still patting her shiny new command console and drooling. We’ll have to do some tuning during the shakedown cruise, and there’s always something that turns out to need more than tuning, but everything I’ve been able to get my hands on so far is nine nines and shiny.”

“And by the time we’re done with the shakedown, he’ll have got his hands on everything else,” Solo added.

“What does your accountant think?” Quatre asked, winking at Shinigami. The dark treecat sat up in his high chair and waved the stalk of celery he was clutching, starting a long, involved series of ‘bleek’s and chittering noises. He finished with a satisfied purr, returning to chewing the stringy end of the stalk.

“That sounded positive,” Relena said uncertainly.

“It was,” Quatre assured her. “He’s happy with the build, especially since it was brought in under budget.”

“How do you **know**?”

“Uh…” He blinked, puzzled. “I just do?”

“He’s right,” Duo shrugged, leaning back in his chair again. “Q gets ‘cats. I’m surprised you’ve never been adopted yourself, dude.”

“And I don’t understand how **you** know, either,” she persisted, mock-frowning at him. “When most people talk to their treecats, it’s very obviously one-sided. You have actual conversations, complete with pauses for them to answer.”

“Uh.” Duo and Solo exchanged an odd, half-amused half-wary glance. “We just do?”

She sighed, eyeing all three of them tolerantly. “Well, I’m sure Loki and Shinigami would object if you were making up their side of it--”

Loki chirped smugly and nodded at her.

“--so I’m just going to accept it and move on. Are you sure you don’t have time to come down to Manticore and have an actual holiday? It seems a shame for you to just turn around and leave again after coming all the way from Silesia.”

The two captains exchanged another glance, and shook their heads in unison. “Sorry,” Solo replied, sounding genuinely apologetic. “We really do need to get going. There’s the shakedown phase on the way back, and then we have some Sweepers-specific mods to install--”

“Which Hauptman Yards are still trying to find out about,” Quatre muttered into his glass.

“--and **then** we can get out and about and start using these ships the way they’re intended to be used,” Solo finished, grinning coldly.

“Besides, no offence, but we’ve been living on stations and ships all our lives,” Duo added. “Being dirtside makes us twitchy.”

Relena blinked. “Twitchy? May I ask why? Most people I know who express a preference say they’re more comfortable on-planet, because there are fewer things that can go catastrophically wrong.”

“Yeah, that may be true, but try telling that to our instincts.” He rolled his eyes expressively. “To them, a wind means there’s a seal blown and we’re decompressing. Funny smells mean the scrubbers aren’t working. Temperature changes mean the environmental systems are completely down. Bugs mean holy crap, there’s an infestation in Hydroponics and we’re going to be eating ration paste for a month while we get it under control. Thunder means someone misjudged their thrust and rammed the station, and rain is just freaky weird. Atmospheric controls are not meant to have the humidity turned up that far, man.”

“Well, in that case I understand,” she said, a little sadly. “It seems like a shame, though.”

“You just want to introduce them to my sisters,” Quatre smirked.

Her sad expression dropped away like another mask, and she shot him a pointed look. “If you’d make them stop nagging me to find them dates, I wouldn’t have to try to shanghai every attractive man who comes within tractor range! My own **brother** won’t come home for holidays any more, and I didn’t even arrange all those ‘accidental meetings’ and ‘coincidental visits’!”

“Yeeeeah we really need to get going,” Duo said hastily, putting his glass down and starting to push his chair back.

“Sit!” Relena pointed at him imperiously. “You are staying for dinner, as planned! Quatre’s sisters are not on the station and they don’t even know you exist, so stop panicking.”

Still relaxed in his own seat, Solo picked up his glass and grinned as his brother reluctantly resettled himself at the table. “We didn’t know these sisters existed until now, either. Are they older or younger than you, Quatre?”

“Older,” the slender young lord said calmly. “All fifteen of them.”

Solo choked on his wine and sputtered helplessly as Loki helpfully thumped his back with one true-hand and a midlimb in counterpoint. Duo froze in mid-movement, eyes wide. “ **Fifteen**?!”

“Fifteen,” Quatre confirmed.

“I thought you were the heir?”

“Yes.”

“But they’re older?”

“Yes.” Quatre grimaced slightly. “The Winner barony is one of the few remaining Manticoran peerages that is still entailed in the male line. My parents held some… old-fashioned… beliefs about not modifying or sex-selecting offspring, and just kept conceiving naturally and tubing each foetus in turn until they came up with me. I’m fairly sure they relaxed those beliefs after fifteen girls, but Mother isn’t around to ask any more and Father would never admit it if it’s true.”

Duo stared at him incredulously. “ **Dude**.”

“Yes.” He smiled faintly. “I’d break the entail in a heartbeat, but it requires a unanimous vote from all the current generation of potential heirs, and none of my sisters want to inherit.”

“They do, however, want to marry,” Relena chimed in dryly. “Or at least date. This desire does not appear to extend to finding their own partners. That seems to be my job.”

Solo coughed, wheezed, and finally found his voice again. “Why?!”

“That’s one of the other old-fashioned beliefs my parents held. Well, my mother,” Quatre corrected himself. “She passed it on to the older girls. Apparently, an **extremely** old-fashioned, restrictive, Anglo-centric belief, hailing from an area of Old Earth that we aren’t even descended from so Allah only knows why she picked it up, says that women shouldn’t marry before their elder sisters. Some of my sisters are interpreting that to mean that I -- not a woman, please note -- cannot marry before them -- again, note that the literal interpretation is ‘should’ not, not ‘can’ not -- and therefore it is my fiancée’s duty to find them partners before they will graciously **allow** us to tie the knot.”

“Your sisters are nuts,” Duo said bluntly.

“Only half a dozen of them,” Quatre said cheerfully. “I just ignore those ones. The rest are quite sane and rather nice, really.”

“They won’t **let** me ignore them,” Relena sighed.

“I keep telling you, threaten them with a restraining order and they’ll shut up to avoid the scandal.”

“I can’t threaten your sisters with a restraining order!”

“Why not? I did.”

* * * * *

“Awright! Ready to move out?” Duo half-sang, stretching his legs out in front of his newer, shinier, bigger, comfier captain’s chair.

//Yep,// Solo replied laconically.

//Been ready for an hour,// Hilde chimed in. //Slowpokes.//

“Hey, you were invited to dinner!” Duo pointed out. “It was awesome, too.”

//Lady Peacecraft had mine boxed up and sent to me,// she said smugly. //I got the noms without having to dress up and practice my manners.//

“Your loss,” he shrugged. “Lady Relena’s pretty cool, and once we got past the bit about Quatre’s crazy relatives we had some fun conversation.”

//The bit about the crazy sisters was fun, too, once we were sure they weren’t going to jump out of an airlock at us,// Solo put in.

//Say what?//

“Tell you later. If we’re all good to go, let’s head out. What stupid name were you calling your ship again, Solo?”

//It was christened and registered three months ago, bro, it’s a bit late to be snarky about it now.//

“It’s never too late to be snarky, you know that! What was it again?” Duo asked, grinning broadly.

// _*sigh*_ _Hellscream_.//

“Oh, yeah, that’s right, you named it after an **asshole**. I forgot.”

//There’s more than one Hellscream. It’s not like I named it ‘Garrosh’.//

“And yet you know exactly who I’m talking about.”

//Duo, either cut the crap and get our departure clearance or I’m doing it myself,// Hilde interrupted.

//At least I’m not running a Blood Elf as my main,// Solo muttered, barely audible. //Has he broken a nail recently?//

“He’s got a manicure kit built into his Gnomish Army Knife, dude, keep with the program.” Still grinning, Duo switched from the private intership link to a channel connecting to the station. “Hey there, Yard Control, this is the _Deathscythe_ requesting an outbound course for a three-ship group, _Deathscythe_ , _Hellscream_ , and _Forsaken_ , heading for the Junction. Got a nice plot for us? Over.”

//Roger that, _Deathscythe_ ,// the local area controller called back. //We’ve got an immediate outbound window if you’re all ready to go, over.//

“We were **born** ready, Control. Over.”

//Good to know, _Deathscythe_ ,// the controller laughed. //Course plot sent; you’ll need to hand over to Junction Central to get your lane information. Over.//

“Roger, Yard Control. So long, and thanks for all the shinies.”

\----------

//So, did the magic smoke come out of any bits of your ship yet?// Hilde sent as the three ships cruised into the Basilisk system.

“No,” Duo said, eyeing her image on the screen dubiously. “Not obviously, anyway. Is there a reason you’re asking?”

She grimaced. //We’ve had to shut down a beta node; it developed a serious flutter when we reconfigured from sails to wedge. Early indications are that the tuner has blown.//

//Well, that’s what a shakedown cruise is **for** ,// Solo pointed out. //The yard can’t test everything at full power.//

//I know! It’s just… a little bit of the shiny has come off my ship already,// she pouted.

“Awwww. Never mind, Hilde, we’ll get you a nice new shiny tuner when we get to the _Toolbox_ ,” Duo soothed. “Or would you rather stop and swap it out now? We’ve got the spares, it won’t take long.”

//Nah, I’ll wait,// she told him, a little mollified. //It won’t affect our accel, so we might as well stick to the schedule and fix everything that shows up at once.//

“Gotcha. Keep an eye on the others in case it was a bad parts batch, though.”

//Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Maxwell.//

\----------

Three systems later, Hilde was swearing as they dropped out of hyper. //--damn substandard lowest bidder mass-produced shitty parts, I am gonna write Hauptmann Yards a letter and it is going to be **nasty** \--//

“Ah, crap, not another one?” Duo asked.

//Two this time!// she raged. //That makes five!//

“Okay, we have officially reached the point where I tell you that we’re stopping and making repairs **now** ,” he said seriously.

//I’m not arguing,// she growled. //However. Could you both please check your beta tuner spares, and tell me what batch numbers they have?//

“Ooh.” Duo winced theatrically as he started calling up the damage control parts database. “So it is a batch problem?”

//Yup. They’re all from batch #375-PT104. And so are **all** the spare tuners on board the _Forsaken_.//

//Ouch,// Solo said. //Okay, we have three spare beta tuners from that batch, I’ve red-listed them. All the rest of our spares are from batch #375-PT099, and… all the beta tuners currently in use on _Hellscream_ are from batches ending in 099 and 098.//

“No 104s here,” Duo confirmed. “All 097 and 098. I guess we know what order Hauptmann stocked our spares in, hey?”

//Yup. Most of our installed tuners are from batch 103 and they’re fine so far,// Hilde sighed. //And given that the _Forsaken_ was the last one finished, we’re probably the first ship out of the yards to do a full-power run with the bad batch.//

//Guess so. Maybe they’ll give us a credit note or something for reporting the problem to them before they send out half a dozen custom yachts with the same tuners,// Solo suggested.

//If they don’t do **something** above and beyond replacing this shit at their own expense, I am gonna get **rude** \--//

“Well, we’ve got the clean parts list, so I’ll send the tuners over now,” Duo interrupted. “D’you have any more installed from that batch? We should probably swap them now instead of waiting for them to fry next time you have to bring up the wedge.”

//Two more,// Hilde confirmed. //That’d be peachy, thanks Duo.//

“Not a problem. The sooner we get your nodes fixed, the sooner we can get home and you can send that letter,” he replied, eyeing the system display on the main screen.

With no inhabitable planets, no mining prospects, and a white dwarf primary that barely qualified as a star, the system they had stopped in didn’t even rate a proper name, just a catalogue number. The Hillman sector was one of the quieter parts of the Silesian Confederacy, and this was certainly a backwater among backwaters, Duo thought, listening with half his attention to his helmsman and communications officer coordinating the parts transfer with Hilde’s crew. Which of course made it the perfect place for a pirate ship to lurk, either hiding from notice or waiting for a merchant ship or two to bumble past, far from help.

He could feel Shinigami’s amusement in the back of his mind, edged like a smile barely hiding teeth, and grinned back. _Well, we can hope._

\----------

“Hey, boss? I’ve got a hyper footprint, fairly close,” Solo’s communications officer said. “One ship… man, they’re taking their time reconfiguring to wedge,” he added after a pause, sounding mildly scornful. “Sloppy buggers. Oh, there they go. About our mass, looks like, maybe a little lighter… **ooh**.”

“‘Ooh’?” Solo inquired, looking up from his datapad and switching off the book he’d been reading to kill the time.

“Ooh indeed,” the comms officer gloated. “ **Military** acceleration levels, but they don’t have a military transponder; they’re squawking ID for a civilian freighter registered in Jarmon, name of _Pretty Pretty Princess_.”

Loki made a sniggering noise from his comfortable spot draped across the back of Solo’s chair, and his human partner put one hand theatrically over his eyes. “Now that is just sad. Sad and **wrong** ,” he said, struggling not to laugh out loud. “Raise Duo and Hilde, would you? Whisker lasers, just in case they’re smarter than they look so far.”

“ _Deathscythe_ ’s already calling in. One sec… you’re on.”

//Are you seeing what I’m seeing?// Duo’s voice broke in, merry with suppressed laughter.

“If you’re seeing relief from boredom wrapped in the most embarrassing cover identity ever, I guess so,” Solo grinned. “Hilde? How long will it take you to raise your wedge? **Can** you raise it?”

//Stall ‘em for forty minutes? We’ve got three nodes half disassembled with bits all over the floor in here, they’ve got to at least close up before we do any manoeuvres. I can bring up the wedge with just the alpha ring after that, it won’t even hurt our accel much.//

//We’ll put our wedges in the way if they start anything sooner than that,// Duo assured her. //If they’re doing standard pirate tactics, they’ll want to get in close before showing their hand.//

“Which is just fine by me,” Solo put in, “seeing as how we’ve got no torpedoes in the magazines yet. We **need** ‘em to come in close if we wanna take ‘em on with lasers and grasers. Or did you forget that bit?”

//I forgot nothing,// Duo said haughtily. //I may have failed to bring it to mind immediately, but I didn’t forget.//

//There’s something else you might have failed to bring to mind,// Hilde cut in. //We’ve only got standard spares on board. All the specialty stuff is waiting for us at the _Toolbox_ , along with the missiles.//

//So?//

//So, we’ve got no spare false hull plates,// she explained patiently. //And even if we had them on board, we don’t have any worksuits to install them with. Once we blow our plates to uncover our weaponry, we can’t go back under cover for the rest of the trip -- and our planned route takes us through the sector capital, and they **will** send a picket cruiser to look us over.//

//…Okay, I did forget that part,// Duo admitted. //Thoughts?//

“We’re still taking them on if they try us,” Solo said definitely.

//Hell yeah!//

//Duh.//

“So running away without blowing the plates is not an option,” he continued. “The only reason we’ve been system-hopping the way we have is to check our navigational systems, and I for one haven’t found any problems. Have you?”

//Nope,// Duo shrugged, and Hilde shook her head.

“Then it’s simple. If we don’t take any significant damage in the fight, we just recalculate our route home to go all the way in hyper, without dropping out into realspace at all. If one of the ships takes enough damage to make that a bad idea, then we can reconsider… but I don’t think that’s likely.”

//Sounds like a plan,// Hilde agreed.

//Done,// Duo nodded. //Now we just have to wait for them to come to the party.//

\----------

Andreas Lopez leaned back in his seat, gazing happily at the plum prize displayed on the main screen. “I cannot **believe** our luck,” he almost crooned, tucking his hands behind his head and relaxing completely. “Three merchies, and one of them has a drive failure, so all three of them are sitting at rest -- **inside** the hyper limit! They can’t even **try** to run!”

“Sir,” his exec put in, “we’re not supposed to be hunting--”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Lopez snapped, waving one hand dismissively. “Do the standard scans, check for pickets and patrols and pass on the signal and all that first, of course! But once that’s taken care of, there’s nothing to stop us picking up this little tidbit. In fact, you could argue that we **should** , just to eliminate witnesses!”

“Yes, sir,” the officer said in a colourless voice, and Lopez resettled himself, annoyed at the puncturing of his good mood.

“Hail the merchies,” he snapped, flicking his fingers at his comms officer. “Give them some nice friendly chit-chat, find out what’s going on and reassure them that we’re nothing to worry about.”

\----------

//You’d better talk to them,// Duo sent, snickering. //Hilde’s busy kicking her repair squads into high gear, and you know I’m not gonna manage anything even close to a poker face.//

“No kidding,” Solo told him, rolling his eyes. “All right, but you owe me one. Put ‘em on my console screen, Bryan; no need for the rest of you to have to play patsy. Just don’t laugh out loud within pickup range.”

“Gotcha,” his comms officer said, flicking switches, and Solo’s console screen blinked as a new window opened, showing a neatly-groomed woman wearing tidy blue civilian shipknits.

//Hello there,// she said, smile colouring her voice but not reaching her eyes. //This is the _Pretty Pretty Princess_ , calling-- uh, the _Hellscream_? Is that right?//

“That’s us,” Solo said easily, smiling back.

//You’ve got kind of odd names,// she pointed out after a few seconds of transmission delay. // _Hellscream_ , _Forsaken_ , and-- how do you pronounce that last one?//

“ _Lor’themar_ ,” Solo supplied, mentally snickering at the false transponder data Duo had chosen for the trip. A lot of pirates had heard about the _Deathscythe_ ; his and Hilde’s new ships were still anonymous enough to go by their real data. “They’re all game references. I don’t suppose you play World of Warcraft?”

//I’m afraid not. I think I’ve heard of it, though; is it fun?//

“Yeah, but you don’t want me to spend three hours singing its praises to you,” he grinned. “Are you just passing through?”

//We’re on charter, yes. It looks like your friend is having some drive trouble, though. Need a hand?//

“Nah, they’re just tweaking some nodes,” he shrugged. “More time-consuming than anything, we’re going to be stuck in place for a while. Nothing to worry about, really.”

This time, the smile did reach her eyes. //Oh, that’s good to hear. This isn’t a nice system to run into problems in.//

“You’re right there,” he told her, feeling his own smile widen. “Well, we won’t keep you. Have a good trip!”

//You too,// she said sunnily, and in the moment before her transmission cut out he thought he saw her lips curl with contempt.

“Well, they think we’re sitting here all fat and happy,” he said after checking to make sure his own transmission had ended.

“Yup,” Bryan agreed. “And they just did something odd.”

“Odd how?”

“Flared their wedge strength type odd. They didn’t change acceleration or heading or anything, just… revved it up for a second.”

“Signalling?” Solo guessed. “That sort of flare would be detectable a long way out-system, and even into the lower hyper bands. If they’ve got friends on the way in, this could get sticky.”

“I dunno about that,” Bryan snorted. “Even without missiles, we’ve got a heavier weapon load than any pirate I ever heard of, and there’s three of us.”

“But there might be half a dozen of them,” Solo pointed out, then shrugged. “Oh well, we’ll find out. What’s their heading?”

“Cutting across the system parallel to the ecliptic, if you can call it an ecliptic when you’ve only got a couple of cinders and some dust to measure it by,” the nav officer told him, putting a diagram up on the main screen. “They’re going to pass well within laser and graser range, in-system of us; I’m guessing they chose that heading because it looks like they’re going towards the Tumult sector’s closest trading centres, and a stereotypical pirate course would put them out-system of us to box us in. If they do have friends on the way,” he finished, looking at the course plot with satisfaction, “they’re not waiting for them.”

\----------

“Even if we were really merchants, we’d have to be suspicious by now,” Duo pointed out, rolling his eyes. “They’ve got to be pulling the lowest acceleration ever seen in this system. It wouldn’t be plausible as their normal operating speed even if we hadn’t seen ‘em boosting way harder when they first hypered in.”

//Ah, but we’re supposed to be fat, happy, and **stupid** ,// Solo replied. //Didn’t you know that all pirates are handsome, dashing ne’er-do-wells with brilliant minds, cruelly wounded and driven to a life of derring-do by an uncaring society, and all merchant shippers are overweight sloppy idiots? Haven’t you seen the vids?//

“Damn, I’d better start eating more junk food in that case, or I’ll blow our cover just by being this shape.”

//Finished!// Hilde crowed in triumph as her com window opened. //And we’ve only got two beta nodes that’re still down. The twerps can start the party any time now. What’s keeping them?//

“Best as I can figure, they don’t want to blow past us at a high relative velocity and then have to decelerate and come back,” Duo shrugged. “So instead they’re crawling along like the universe’s first hyper-capable snail.”

//We could always start it ourselves…//

“Impatient much? Let ‘em get in range, sheesh!”

//I bet I can make them get into range faster,// she grinned.

//How?// Solo asked, one eyebrow lifting.

//All I’ve gotta do is bring up the wedge. If they think we’re about to get away, they’ve just about **got** to declare themselves, or else give up on us.//

“And since they’ve already gone to the trouble of pussyfooting halfway across the system to reach us, that’s not likely,” Duo agreed. “Do it.”

\----------

“The third ship just brought up their wedge,” Lopez’s executive officer pointed out in his annoyingly flat, emotionless voice. “Looks like they finished tweaking their nodes.”

“I can **see** that, Bowman,” Lopez snarled. “Kick up our acceleration, and get that captain on the com.”

//Hey there, _Princess_ ,// the long-haired blond said cheerfully, popping up on screen. //What’s up?//

“Yeah, you know how we were talking before? About how this is a bad system to run into trouble?” the comms officer drawled. “ **So** sorry for the inconvenience, but either you strike your wedges and stand by to be boarded, or we start shooting.”

//Seriously? You’re pirates? With **that** ship name?// the _Hellscream_ ’s captain scoffed.

“Ever heard of an alias? Yes, seriously,” she answered. “Now strike your wedges and--”

“Gunnery, fire a warning shot,” Lopez snapped impatiently. “You, whatever your name is, is this convincing enough?”

A single torpedo flashed out from the pirate ship’s chase tube, streaking ahead and exploding harmlessly some distance from the three civilian ships. On screen, the _Hellscream_ ’s captain leaned to one side, apparently studying a display.

//Yeah, that’s a torpedo all right,// he eventually admitted. //Huh. Give us a minute, will ya?//

The screen went blank as his transmission cut out, leaving both Lopez and the comms officer staring open-mouthed.

“ **Give him a** \-- Who does he think he’s dealing with?!” Lopez sputtered after a long moment. “Get him back!”

“They’re not answering.”

“I don’t give a **shit** if they’re not answering! Tell them if they don’t strike their wedges **now** , we’ll blow them to kingdom come!”

“They’re doing something,” Bowman announced, tapping keys to refine a scan. “Jettisoning cargo, maybe? There’s… debris…” His voice slowed and stopped, and his one visible eye narrowed.

“Gunnery, fire another--”

Alarms buzzed on the gunnery console, and the officer yelped in dismay. “They’re hitting us with targeting systems, radar and lidar-- they’ve got targeting systems? They’re **armed**?!”

“They just raised sidewalls!” somebody else shouted.

//Hey there, _Pretty Pretty Pirate Pricks_ ,// the blond man said cheerfully, reappearing on-screen. // **So** sorry for the inconvenience, but like you said before, either you strike your wedge and surrender or we blow you full of holes. There’s three of us, there’s one of you, and I guarantee we’re faster and nastier than your incompetent asses. If you don’t believe me, consider this: My name is Solo Ramirez y Maxwell, and I think you’ve probably heard of my brother and I.//

“Ramirez y Maxwell?” Lopez stuttered, staggered by the speed at which the tables had turned on him. “Wait-- I don’t--”

“Solo and Duo Ramirez y Maxwell,” Bowman told him, gazing calmly at the main screen. His hands had left his controls, dropping uselessly into his lap. “Co-captains of the _Deathscythe_.”

“ _Deathscythe_ … but, uh, that’s not…”

//Ever heard of an alias?// Solo grinned.

The three ships were spreading out, angling away from each other and moving to bracket the pirate ship at accelerations it couldn’t match. Gathering his wits, Lopez made a ‘cut’ gesture at his comms officer and turned to snarl at the helmsman.

“Flare the wedge,” he ordered. “Send the abort signal! Tell the other ships to stand off!”

“Don’t,” Bowman said, voice cold. There was a flechette gun in his hand now, aimed halfway between the captain and the helmsman. “Strike the wedge.”

“What the **hell** do you think you’re--”

The gun twitched to the right and spat a short burst, three darts, that slapped Lopez out of his chair and against the bulkhead with a sharp _*hiss-crack*_ ; then it swung back, aimed between the helmsman and the comms officer now.

“Strike the wedge,” Bowman repeated, almost gently. “And open the channel again.”

\----------

“Their wedge is down,” Cheng-yi reported, hunched tensely over his console.

“Aw man, you mean we don’t get to shoot them even once?” Duo mock-pouted.

“Guess not,” his comms officer commiserated. “They’re hailing us.”

“Stick ‘em up on screen.”

The com window that opened showed a slender man with mid-brown hair styled in a smooth fall that hid one of his green eyes, aiming a nasty little flechette gun at someone off-screen.

//Hello there,// he said calmly. //We surrender.//

“I just bet you do,” Duo grinned, leaning forwards. “Where’s the other guy? The one who was ordering warning shots and all that?”

//I’m afraid Captain Lopez is permanently indisposed.//

“Who indisposed him? You?”

//Yes.//

“Huh.” Duo studied the quiet-voiced man, frowning slightly as he tried to reconcile his actions with the many other pirates he’d encountered since he and Solo began their personal crusade. “So. I gather you’re planning to come quietly?”

//Oh, yes,// the man agreed. //And quickly, please. I have some information that you need.//

“Oh really? Do you also have a reason why I should believe a single damn thing you say, mister pirate?”

//Yes.// The green-eyed man smiled faintly. //Reason one, I’ve locked down all the ship’s weapons and controls, so that nobody on board can shoot at you or run away. You have a clear field to come in and take over. Reason two, I can back up all my information with data from the computers. And reason three… I’m not actually a pirate.//

The flechette gun stayed rock-steady as he raised his free hand to his mouth and poked two fingers inside, prodding at his tongue. After a moment he winced slightly and pulled his hand away, holding a thin sheet of something opaque and flesh-coloured; then he turned his head fully towards the com pickup and stuck out his tongue, displaying smeared-looking black lines and dots like a blurred bar code.

//Oh fuck,// somebody whimpered. //Audubon Ballroom. We’re **screwed**.//

* * * * *

Genetic slavery might be **technically** outlawed in virtually every star nation, but in practice many governments either actively participated in the slave trade or looked the other way as it went on around them. In Silesia, it was almost expected. Not all of the ‘customers’ were prosperous enough to deal directly with Mesa and the huge Manpower conglomerate, but smaller corporations bought and re-sold ‘designer’ slaves across all the sectors.

The larger star nations with stakes in the Silesian confederacy -- Manticore, Haven, and the Andermani Empire -- did their best to quash the trade, but they were often hamstrung by the treaties under which they operated. Slavers they captured usually had to be handed over to local governments for trial, and it wasn’t uncommon for one set to be encountered again soon after they’d been ‘sentenced’ and ‘imprisoned’, in a new ship and back at their old trade. As a result, what the slavers really feared wasn’t being captured by a warship; it was being found by the Audubon Ballroom.

Made up of escaped and freed slaves, the Ballroom were -- again, technically -- terrorists. The governments who ignored the slave trade opposed them; the governments who genuinely worked against it tended to find reasons not to arrest Ballroom agents. The display of a barcoded tongue was both their identification, and a combined threat and insult to anyone involved in the trade.

* * * * *

“Okay, we’ve got the full pirate crew disarmed and under lock and key in their own cargo hold,” Solo reported, checking his notes. “Mystery dude here was telling the truth about having the whole ship on lockdown; half of them were stuck in isolated compartments, trying to get the doors to open. A few had personal sidearms, but the worst damage anyone took was a minor suit puncture, and since we were operating in atmosphere they didn’t even decompress. We got to the bridge with him opening doors for us along the way, and I have never seen a pirate so happy to be captured as that bridge crew. They were shitting themselves. Anyway, he gave us the codes to take over, and the _Pretty Pretty Prick_ is all ours now.”

//Sweet,// Duo said over the com, eyeing the ‘mystery dude’ now standing next to Solo’s console. //Explanations now? Are you really from the Audubon Ballroom? I thought those bar codes were supposed to be neater.//

“My father was a genetic slave,” the green-eyed man said calmly. “My mother was a Marine on the ship that freed him. The barcoding breaks down pretty fast if you don’t have somebody tweaking it in utero.”

//Right. So what’s this fantastically important information you have for us?//

“The _Princess_ was the lead scout of a two-ship team escorting a slave ship to Breslau. Lopez didn’t manage to warn them off, so the slaver and its remaining escort should be arriving in-system in less than two hours. There are five hundred slaves on board, and if the crew think they’re in danger of being captured they’ll space them all to get rid of the evidence.”

Solo, Duo, and Hilde all stared at him. He stared back.

//…Well, shit,// Hilde said eventually. //This is gonna take some strategy.//

\----------

Duo sat back in his chair, feeling the comforting weight of Shinigami’s true-hand on one shoulder as the treecat snuggled close. “Damn,” he said mildly. “Okay, first of all, what’s your name? We can’t keep calling you ‘Mystery Dude’, and ‘Audubon Dude’ is just as bad.”

//Trowa Barton.//

“Trowa, huh. So you say you’ve got all the computer data and so on… can you give us a general idea of where these other ships are gonna come out of hyper?”

//I can give you a fairly precise set of coordinates, yes.//

“Cool. And how fast on the eject button are those assholes likely to be?” Duo persisted, thinking fast. “I mean, is it gonna be ‘well shit, there’s an armed ship we weren’t expecting, buh-bye’, or will they actually think about it for a few minutes?”

Trowa cocked his head, eyeing Duo thoughtfully. //Most likely option two. The slaves represent a major investment for the seller, and the transport crew get a cut; they won’t get rid of them as long as they think they’ve got a chance to escape. They **will** make sure to eject them before another ship gets close enough to get visual scan records of them doing it, though.//

“In that case,” Duo said, starting to grin nastily, “I think I have an idea.”

\----------

An hour and a half later, the three Q-ships were as ready as they were ever going to be. The _Pretty Pretty Princess_ , or whatever warped version of her name she was being called now, had been sent to hide in-system, with a skeleton crew of Sweepers on board to pilot her and keep her old crew contained. The _Deathscythe_ , _Forsaken_ , and _Hellscream_ were all positioned on the hyper boundary, spaced out around the area of space the slave ship and escorting pirate were expected to appear in, drifting silently with their wedges down and all their active systems quiet. Since the main plan was Duo’s, and he was going to be doing all the talking, Trowa had transferred over to the _Deathscythe_ to wait with him.

“Think they’ll be on time?” Duo asked idly, kicking his feet up onto his console and watching the empty starscape on the main screen.

“I assume so,” Trowa said from his borrowed seat nearby. “The _Princess_ always moved on to scout the next system before the _Dirge_ and _Guppy_ hypered in, but the _Guppy_ ’s captain has a reputation for punctuality.”

“Man, talk about a ridiculous set of ship names,” Duo snorted. Trowa raised an eyebrow at him, but didn’t otherwise comment.

“How’d you end up on board, anyway?” the long-haired captain asked after a pause. “I hadn’t exactly pictured the Audubon Ballroom as planting agents on random pirate ships, just on spec.”

“First, if I could ask…” Trowa’s voice trailed off for a moment, then he shrugged and turned to look straight at Duo. “While I do appreciate it, why are you all trusting me so fast?”

“Treecats,” Duo grinned, jerking one thumb at Shinigami, sprawled in his usual place across the back of his chair. The dark-furred ‘cat was suited up in his custom atmosphere suit, but didn’t have the helmet locked down yet; he blinked at Trowa, then yawned, displaying impressive fangs. “If you’d been lying, you’d have found out that they can do a damn good imitation of a buzzsaw.”

“Huh.” Trowa returned Shinigami’s gaze calmly, then smiled faintly at the treecat and turned back to Duo. “It wasn’t so random. We knew that the _Princess_ and _Dirge_ were regularly hired to escort slavers from a couple of the smaller trading companies, but our contact couldn’t get any information on the deliveries. I started out with a good fake background, worked my way up on a ship that has friendly relations with these two, then manufactured a couple of personality conflicts to explain my need to leave and transferred ships. Lopez was a little short on officers and had a tendency to demote people for disagreeing with him, so getting to be his executive officer didn’t take too long.”

“How long **did** all of that take you?”

Trowa’s shrug was almost imperceptible, shoulders moving only a few millimetres. “Nearly eight years.”

Duo winced. “Ouch. That’s a lotta work. Do we need to apologise for messing up your inside job?”

The smile was a little more obvious this time, nearly a smirk, and the Ballroom agent pulled a data chip out of one pocket. “No. With this--” he waved the chip “--I have all the past customer records from the deliveries the _Princess_ escorted, plus a lot of useful financial data… and if I can get on board the _Guppy_ during the transfer, I have a chance to get records from all their **other** deliveries.”

“We’d better make sure the transfer works then, hadn’t we?” Duo grinned.

There was a short pause, and then Duo sighed, letting his head drop back and arms dangle. “You know, if this was a vid show or a book or something, us finishing our conversation would be the signal for the bad guys to show up. Dramatic timing, that’s what this universe needs!”

“I’d settle for the ability to fast-forward through the boring bits,” Trowa replied, smile widening fractionally. “Starting with about five years’ worth of undercover work. There are too many people out there saying things like ‘at least it can’t get any worse’ and ‘what could possibly go wrong’ for me to be comfortable with dramatic timing in real life.”

“Ooh, good point,” Duo agreed. “Oh well. In the absence of a universal remote control with a fast-forward button… d’you play World of Warcraft?”

\----------

During delivery runs, the moment when the _Dirge_ dropped out of hyper to enter a new system was simultaneously tense and boring. Boring, because they’d done it a thousand times before and the _Pretty Pretty Princess_ had already sent the signal that meant there was nothing out of the ordinary waiting for them. Tense, because there was always the possibility that their scout had missed something.

_I bet Lopez only feels the ‘boring’ part,_ the captain thought, eyes flicking from one readout to the next as the ship gradually picked up speed, heading in-system, and his crew members confirmed the initial scan results. No active emissions, no ship wedges showing up on the gravity scans, nothing to show that the _Princess_ had messed up this time. _He’s getting careless… escort runs aren’t exciting enough for him any more. Well, screw exciting; I want to live to get paid. I want to live to **retire**. A couple more runs and I’ll have enough saved to buy myself an annuity and a nice little estate… Schmitt keeps saying he’ll give me a discount if I buy the slaves to staff it through him--_

Alarms went off on the tactical console, and a single red ship icon blinked into view on the main screen, frighteningly close. “Active emissions!” the tac officer blurted, hands flashing over his keyboard. “Targeting lidar-- weapons powering up--!”

_We don’t have our sidewalls up yet!_ “Roll ship eighty degrees port!” the captain yelled, a heartbeat after the helmsman had started the manoeuvre on his own initiative. “Signal to _Guppy_ , reverse course--”

Two more ship icons blinked onto the screen around the _Dirge_. One was positioned ‘up’ relative to the pirate ship’s new orientation, direct fire blocked by the roof of the _Dirge_ ’s wedge. The final ship--

“Skew ninety degrees down! They’re right behind--” He paled as he realised that would give the second ship a perfect shot, and corrected himself. “No, sixty degrees down! Sixty!”

The helmsman hesitated for a second, processing the amended order, and _Forsaken_ ’s lasers and grasers fired from only a few thousand kilometres away. It was practically point-blank by the standards of space battles, straight up the rear opening of the _Dirge_ ’s wedge in a perfect up-the-kilt broadside.

\----------

Robert Schmitt, captain of the _Guppy_ , stared open-mouthed for a few precious seconds at the expanding fireball that was all that was left of his escort before swallowing hard and starting to bark orders.

“Reverse course, full emergency acceleration! Get us back over the hyper limit! And get IDs on those ships, if they’re pirates we can negotiate!” Even as he said it, though, he knew it was a futile hope. Pirates didn’t blow ships out of space **before** robbing them, which meant that his opponents were almost certainly some sort of military.

Hopefully some sort of military. He knew people in almost every sector of Silesian space, and he knew people who knew other people. Higher-ranked people. Military, he could wriggle out of--

“We’re being hailed,” his comms officer announced.

//Hey there, _Guppy_ ,// a hard voice said as the com window opened. A long-haired man was lounging in a station chair, cheek resting on one fist, legs sprawled casually and dark blue eyes glaring into the pickup. Behind him, some sort of dark-furred predator stretched and yawned. //That was your warning. Strike your wedge and turn your cargo over to us, and we’ll let you keep your ship and leave unmolested. This is a one-time offer. Do anything else, and we will blast you out of existence the way we did your escort. If we see any indication that you’ve decompressed your holds or jettisoned your cargo, you’re all **dead**.//

Schmitt swallowed again, automatically trying to bluff. “I don’t know what you’re--”

The young man -- he looked young, at least, which meant he could be anywhere from thirty to ninety T-years old in real life -- leaned forward, lips skinning back from his teeth in a humourless grin. //You’re currently using the name Robert Schmitt. Your **real** name is Rupert Schmidt,// he said, precisely enunciating the difference between alias and reality. //You’ve been employed by HBT Transport for the past forty-five years. They’re a shell corporation, a cover for slave runners who buy their wares from Manpower at a discount and resell them in small groups or individually. Your current cargo is five hundred and twelve genetic slaves bound for sale on Breslau, and their lives are the only things standing between you and a face full of photons. Drop. Your. Wedge. **Now**!//

“…How do I know you won’t just shoot us afterwards?” Schmitt/Schmidt asked weakly. _He knows everything! He’s got the manifest! He knows my **name**!_

//My name is Duo Ramirez y Maxwell. This ship is the _Deathscythe_. If you know anything about me, you know that I keep my word, though admittedly I’m usually promising to hunt some asshole down,// the young man said, almost amiably. //You have my word that if you hand over your cargo, unharmed, we will let you go. You also have my word that if you **don’t** hand over your cargo, you’ll fry. And if you’re not sure whether or not I’ll keep **that** promise,// he went on, waving one hand in a beckoning motion to one side of the screen, //maybe you’ll believe this dude.//

A tall, athletically slender man stepped into view, and Schmitt/Schmidt’s head snapped up, eyes narrowing in anger. “Bowman!” he began angrily. “You--”

‘Bowman’s expression didn’t change as he stuck out his tongue, and the slaver captain shrank back in his chair. “Oh, **shit**.”

//Oh, yeah,// Ramirez y Maxwell agreed, grinning nastily. //The only thing he wants more than you dead is your cargo, alive and unharmed. If you give him option B, I promise to convince him to leave option A out. Do we have a deal?//

“…You’ve got a deal,” Schmitt/Schmidt almost whispered. “Strike the wedge.”

\----------

Things moved fairly quickly after that. The three Q-ships had a pinnace and a cargo shuttle each, and all of them were pressed into service to bring the _Guppy_ ’s live cargo to safety. The _Princess_ was already on its way back to take its share of the load, but things were still going to be tight; the Q-ships might look like merchanters externally, but in reality ninety percent of their cargo space was taken up by munitions stores and spare parts, and the Sweepers were understandably reluctant to let a flood of complete strangers into their living quarters.

_Captain Maxwell-- Duo-- promised to deliver them all to somewhere safe, as quickly as possible,_ Trowa told himself. He was sitting next to the airlock in _Deathscythe_ ’s pinnace, biting one thumbnail as he watched the _Guppy_ ’s side swell in the forward viewscreen. _He trusted my information… now I need to trust him. Them. All of them,_ he amended, changing the focus of his gaze to study the men and women sharing the pinnace with him in their reflections on the screen without seeming to look at them. _They seem sincere…_

A familiar face swam into focus behind him, and if he hadn’t been so used to concealing his emotions he would have jumped.

“You don’t look nervous,” Duo said casually, planting crossed arms on the back of Trowa’s seat and leaning over them, “but I think you are. We’ll get it done, don’t worry.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Pffft, like I was gonna stay out of the action! This is my plan, y’know, I’m gonna see it through and make sure **you** get back safe to the _’Scythe_ ,” Duo snorted. “That asshole recognised you, so if you get spotted on board without backup you could be in deep shit.”

Trowa turned to look directly at him, and raised one eyebrow as he realised Duo had changed into the same plain, insignia-less grey shipknits he was wearing, similar to what the slaves would have been issued and the best camouflage they’d been able to devise on short notice. “…I don't think I’ll need the help,” he said eventually, “but I do appreciate it. Thank you.”

//We’re about to dock,// the pilot said over the intercom. //If you’ve taken off your restraints, put ‘em back on until we’re stable. That means you, Duo.//

“They know you so **well** ,” Trowa murmured, turning back to the screen to watch the docking as Duo sat back with a grumble and buckled his straps.

The half-dozen Sweepers who’d volunteered for transport duty on the pinnace were wearing heavy-duty construction spacesuits; they were unpowered, but equivalent to light armour, and the laser cutters they were hefting were probably more threatening than actual weapons would have been. Flechette guns wouldn’t go straight through a bulkhead and depressurise a compartment, for one thing. Trowa hoped they all had the sense to aim towards the centre of the ship instead of outwards, if it came to a fight.

“The cutters are all detuned,” Duo muttered in his ear, barely audible over the clanks and thumps of the pinnace’s airlock latching into the ship’s grapples. “Broader focus and lower power. They won’t go through a wall on those settings, but they’ll take out anyone who isn’t in some sort of armour.”

_How did he know I was worrying about that? Just a good guess?_ the Ballroom agent wondered, then dismissed the question as the warning light above the airlock flashed green.

The Sweepers stood first, lining up in front of the airlock and blocking Trowa and Duo from outside view; they moved over to the bulkhead beside the airlock door and waited for the right opportunity. The viewscreen flickered and changed to a helmet camera feed, and Trowa felt Duo shift impatiently beside him as the airlock opened to show the _Guppy_ ’s cargo hold.

There were maybe two hundred slaves already there, huddled against the far wall and watching the airlock -- and the bigger cargo airlock -- with expressions of suppressed fear and despair. They swayed backwards as the personnel airlock opened to admit the _Deathscythe_ ’s crew members, and a soft noise rose above the background sounds of feet on the deck, a low hopeless moan made up of scores of gasps and whimpers.

_Bastards,_ Trowa thought, fists clenching for a moment before he got himself back under control. _They didn’t even let them know what was happening-- let them think they were being spaced--_

Duo’s hand touched his arm, patted his shoulder. “They’ll get theirs,” he whispered. “We’ve got their data, and we’re Sweepers; we can scan this ship in ways they don’t even know exist. Hell, we can **bug** this ship in ways they don’t know how to look for! They’ll make a few cosmetic modifications and change the transponder codes, and they’ll head out again thinking they’re anonymous, but any Sweeper ship that comes near them will know who they are. And then they’ll tell **us** ,” he hissed, voice darkening. “We’ll find them again. We’ll get them when they’re running empty. No hostages to threaten. And like I told that asshole,” he went on quietly, dark eyes staring up at Trowa as the Ballroom agent turned to look at him, “this was a one-time offer. We won’t let them go next time.”

“Why do you care?” Trowa found himself asking, not sure why. “Why do you care this much?”

Duo’s expression was uncharacteristically serious as he answered. “We hate pirates. Slavers are just pirates who buy their victims instead of hunting them down.”

“Listen up, ladies and gentlemen!” the lead Sweeper bellowed, raising her faceplate. “We are not slavers. We are Sweepers, and this is a rescue. The calmer you are and the more you cooperate, the faster we can get you off this heap of junk!”

“Go Lexie,” Duo snickered, mercurial expression switching back to amusement. “She was the first Sweeper to sign up when we started hunting. Awesome lady.”

“Please line up and count off in groups of ten!” Lexie continued as the other Sweepers fanned out along the outer bulkhead, warily watching for threats. “This pinnace can carry ninety of you. There will be more shuttles. We will take you **all**. We promise.”

Bewildered and frightened, but used to obeying orders, the slaves shuffled forwards and began to arrange themselves into groups. Here and there, two or three of them held hands and clung together, determined to not be separated, grabbing friends to fill out their ten-count.

“What **are** you planning to do with them?” Trowa asked quietly, watching the screen. The Sweeper with the helmet camera was slowly panning back and forth across the crowd, pausing as his line of sight crossed each of the doors that led out of the hold.

“Dude, I have no fucking idea,” Duo admitted. “I was planning on taking them all with us to the _Toolbox_ \-- that’s our home base -- then ask **you** for suggestions. And them, of course,” he added, starting to crouch as the first groups tentatively approached the airlock. “At least some of them will have ideas on where they want to go.”

“Sounds good to me,” Trowa murmured. He combed his hair roughly backwards with both hands, parting it in the middle and letting it fall loosely on both sides, looking quite different to the way he had with half his face hidden behind one smooth wing.

“Move to the back of the cabin, sit down, and strap in,” Lexie was repeating as the slaves moved forward. “Twenty, thirty… move to the back of the cabin, sit down, and strap in.”

“Spotted a target?” Duo asked.

“Inventory terminal on the other side of the hold,” Trowa nodded, tucking his hair behind his ears. “It should have the accesses I need.”

“Gotcha.”

The first slaves entered, looking around with frightened eyes, and checked for a moment as they saw Trowa and Duo. Duo waved, grinning, and Trowa lifted one finger to his lips in a ‘shhh’ gesture, then stuck out his tongue.

“Audubon Ballroom,” somebody whispered, and the slaves’ eyes widened.

Trowa stepped forwards, ducking slightly to keep his head below the average height of the slaves, and they parted to let him pass. _“Audubon Ballroom,”_ the whisper ran down the line. _“Ballroom. Let him through. Audubon Ballroom.”_ Duo followed, and the slaves flowed around them, hiding their movement, looking away or towards the airlock.

“Fifty, sixty,” Lexie counted as they passed, not reacting, though Trowa saw her eyes flick towards them and then away. “Move to the back of the cabin…”

They slid into the main crowd, and the whisper went with them. _“Audubon Ballroom,”_ in hushed tones, rippling out to the edges of the crowd of slaves and then fading into silence. A few of the younger slaves, barely more than children, looked directly at them as they passed, but others turned away and nudged the starers, trading warning glances and faint shakes of the head. More whispers rose, _“don’t look at them”_ and _“keep your head down”_ \-- and a slightly louder whisper from a stunningly beautiful young woman who looked straight past them.

“Wait a second,” she whispered, lips barely moving. “They’re bringing another rack in.”

They paused, turning around to face the airlock as if they were waiting their turn to line up, and the slaves shuffled around them, closing in and hiding their slightly too pale shipknits from view. A doorseal hissed behind them, then opened with a puff of air as pressures equalised, and the crowd eddied forwards as more slaves stumbled into the hold. The whispers started again as the door slammed.

_“It’s okay.”_

_“We’re being rescued.”_

_“Those two are Audubon Ballroom, don’t stare--”_

Lexie’s voice rose behind them as they reached the inventory terminal. “Okay! This pinnace is full! There will be another shuttle at this airlock in a few minutes; it can take one hundred and ten of you! Please line up and count off so that you are ready to move as soon as it arrives!” She paused for a moment, then went on. “We are rescuing **all** of you. We promise. We will keep sending shuttles until you are **all** safe aboard! Make sure nobody gets left behind!”

“I think that was aimed at us,” Duo muttered, crouching down at the terminal next to Trowa. Slaves shuffled behind them again, clumping up to hide them from view.

“I think you’re right,” Trowa agreed, pulling a flat case the size of a playing card out of the breast of his shipknits. Wires and connecters spooled out as he tugged one side of it open, and he plugged them into the terminal’s chip slot.

“Nice setup,” Duo complimented him, eyeing the tiny display on the miniature tablet. “Guess we might not have to use mine,” he added, pulling a slightly larger case out of his own shipknits.

“You never know,” Trowa shrugged, thumb-typing commands onto the cramped input surface. “If this one is going to work at all, it’ll do it in about ten minutes. Give it… twelve, say? and if I’m not getting anywhere, we’ll try yours.”

“Deal.”

“Do you have any weapons?” another voice asked quietly.

Trowa shot one quick glance over his shoulder, then continued typing; Duo turned to consider the speaker. It was the same female slave who’d warned them to pause while more slaves were driven into the hold, looking away from them as she watched the groups patiently lining up by the airlock. Her hair was in a braid even longer than Duo’s, a glossy golden rope trailing down her back nearly to her knees.

“We might have something,” Duo said cautiously. “Why?”

“They’re bringing the racks in by distance order,” she told them, voice almost inaudible but perfectly clear. “Closest to the hold first. Rack H should be next.” She paused, flicking a glance towards them and then away, a brief glimpse of ice blue eyes under strange feathery eyebrows. “There’s a collaborator in that rack, if they haven’t taken care of him already. Do you have a weapon I can borrow? I can manage without, but it might get noisy.”

“Um.” Duo boggled at her for a moment, then turned helplessly towards Trowa. “Tro? Thoughts?”

Not looking up from his screen, Trowa shrugged. “Knife any use to you?”

“Perfect.”

“Give her a knife.”

“If you say so, man,” Duo said doubtfully, sliding a thin blade out of his sleeve. The young woman took it without looking at him and vanished into the crowd with barely a ripple to show where she passed.

“Problem?” Trowa asked, voice pitched for Duo’s ears only.

“That is one **scary** lady, Tro, knife or no knife!” he hissed back, rolling his eyes. Trowa stifled a laugh, and kept typing.

\----------

Half an hour later, Duo’s homemade hacking setup was plugged into the chip slot and he was swearing quietly over the display. Trowa’s tablet had stripped the navigational system of all its information relating to past voyages, then choked on the more highly secured files that held client and financial data; Duo’s setup was chewing its way through the protections, but it was taking time. Possibly too much time.

“The second-to-last shuttle is loading now,” the blonde slave woman murmured, wandering ‘idly’ back past them. “We’re going to have to move.”

Duo ignored her, tapping icons and typing commands seemingly at random. Trowa was fairly sure some of what he was typing in was swear words, but they produced results, so he didn’t mention it. The slaves camouflaging them were sitting and standing around them in apparently idle groups, but there were no more being forced into the hold and repeated shuttle runs had thinned their numbers to the point where it was beginning to look odd for them to concentrate against that wall.

“Duo?” Trowa asked quietly, trying not to break his concentration.

“Nearly done,” Duo muttered, not pausing. “I-- ha! Suck on that, shitheads!”

“I **think** that’s a good sign,” Trowa said blandly, looking back at the woman.

“Downloading now,” Duo told him, turning the screen so he could see the scrolling file names. “Gonna take three more minutes if the progress bar can be believed, but it always lies. Call it five, then I’m unplugging even if it’s not finished.”

The blonde woman stared at him, expression unreadable, then seemed to come to some decision. “Will those files help?”

“Huh?” Distracted at last, Duo blinked up at her. “Help how?”

“Help stop all this,” she explained, gesture taking in the slave ship’s walls and the listening slaves clustered around them. He snorted.

“Lady, if these files are what we hope they are, a lot of the people doing ‘all this’ are gonna be **screwed** ,” he told her, grinning nastily. “Massively screwed. **Epically** screwed, even.”

She nodded, ice-blue eyes cold. “Don’t unplug. We’ll stall,” she said shortly, and slid away towards the airlock where the next groups of slaves were lining up.

Duo watched her go, eyebrows at odd angles, then looked at Trowa. “Should we worry?”

“…Maybe,” Trowa agreed, eyes serious, then looked up at the slaves around them. Most were still pretending to watch the loading, but they were starting to glance back over their shoulders at the two strangers hiding in their midst. “Get ready to move,” he said quietly. “Pick your groups now so you can line up quickly once we’re done.”

“Okay,” one young man muttered, trading looks with his friends. “We’ll put you in our group and go in the middle, all right?”

“Thanks.” Trowa nodded to him, then turned back to Duo. “How’s that progress bar going?”

“Still chugging along--” Duo cut off as shouts and screams broke out among the groups already lined up. The slaves surrounding them were standing up, craning their necks to see, but if he ducked to squint past their legs he could see confused movement, somebody swinging punches, and a long golden braid whipping from side to side as its owner dodged. “Well, that’s one way to stall, I guess,” he muttered, hunching over the screen again and watching the progress bar inch across.

\----------

“What’s the holdup?” Solo asked, keeping his expression hard to hide any trace of worry. The current shuttle was late loading, and that left the _Hellscream_ ’s pinnace in a holding position, waiting its turn. Everything had gone smoothly so far, loads of slaves transferred efficiently and quickly to the three Q-ships and their newly captured prize, but having something go wrong made him feel like the other shoe was going to drop… especially since he knew where Duo was and what he was doing.

_He didn’t have to go himself!_ he raged inwardly, waiting for the slaver captain’s reply. _He didn’t have to send anyone! Barton’s from the Ballroom, people like that don’t **need** backup. And he couldn’t take Shini with him, so if anything happens I won’t **know** \--_

//It’s not our fault!// Schmitt insisted, visibly sweating. //We got all the cargo into the hold, and that’s the end of our involvement as far as I’m concerned. Some of them are fighting and it’s up to your people to sort it out; none of us are going to go in there now, there’s no telling what they’ll do!//

“Interesting how you avoid saying the word ‘slave’,” Solo said dryly, and watched the man flush dark red. “Whatever. Switch off, Bryan,” he added, and his comms officer cut the connection.

“We gonna do anything?” Bryan asked, and Solo lifted his hands in a helpless gesture. Behind him, Loki crooned gently and pressed his chin against his shoulder.

“I don’t see that we **can** do anything,” he admitted. “We can’t get the shuttle on a secure connection, can we?”

The comms officer chewed his lip and wiggled one flattened hand in a ‘maybe’ gesture. “Yes and no,” he said slowly. “We can scramble it, but we don’t know how good the bad guys’ decryption software is, and we can’t prevent them from overhearing us. Even a whisker laser won’t do the trick; a docked shuttle is way too small a target to hit without the ship it’s docked to being able to receive it as well.”

“About what I figured,” Solo sighed, letting his head drop back to nestle into Loki’s warm fur. “And we never thought a situation like this would come up, so we don’t have super secret spy code words or anything like that to use. What sort of code word could you use to mean ‘has my brother screwed up his infiltration mission’, anyway?”

\----------

“Done,” Duo whispered, yanking the connectors out of the chip slot and stuffing everything back into his shipknits. “Let’s get out of here before Rapunzel decides she needs to knife someone for a better diversion.”

The slaves who had already lined up had used the ‘distraction’ fight as an excuse to back away, pushing into the group still standing against the wall and thickening the camouflage around Trowa and Duo; now they surged forwards again, separating the combatants and pushing the blonde woman back. The group that had designated themselves as camouflage for the two interlopers pressed in around them, moving into the centre of the slaves waiting for the last flight, and one of them reached out and pulled the woman into their midst. She was breathing hard, eyes bright and lips curled in an excited smile, with a few wisps of hair escaping to stick to her cheeks and a bruise developing along her jaw.

“That was fun,” she announced brightly, and the young man who’d grabbed her snorted.

“Did he hurt you, Cat?”

“Of course not.”

“Fine. Did **you** hurt **him**?” he asked, rolling his eyes.

“Maybe.” ‘Cat’ cocked her head to one side, considering. “I’m pretty sure I cracked some of his ribs.”

“Well, we’ve got medical personnel on board,” Duo said dryly, keeping his head down. “Did he at least know why you were fighting?”

“Of course not!” She sniffed. “He’s stock standard V-line, he’s no good at acting.”

“Thank you for that,” Trowa said seriously, nodding to her. “I won’t know for sure until we can analyse the files we got, but I think we managed to download enough to be very useful.”

“Good,” she replied, eyes suddenly cold. “I might have had to **hurt** you otherwise.”

Duo eyed her nervously, shuffling away half a step, but Trowa just watched her calmly. “You could try,” he said, then held up a hand as her eyes lit up again. “Later. We don’t need to stall any more right now.”

“Okay, this shuttle is full!” one of the suited Sweepers declared, raising his voice to reach the back of the shrunken crowd. “A pinnace will dock in a few minutes, it will have room for all the rest of you. A couple of us are going to stay here to make sure you’re ready to go when it arrives,” he finished, pointedly looking straight at ‘Cat’ as he said that; she snickered under her breath, lowering her eyes demurely.

They waited in near-silence as the shuttle uncoupled and left; one of the two remaining Sweepers stayed near the airlock, laser cutter at the ready as she watched the doors on the other side of the hold, while the second walked along the waiting line, counting groups. After a moment he walked back, stopping at each group to count how many were in each. At the head of the line he paused to confer with his shipmate, then started back again, slower.

“--five, six, seven--”

“Wassup, Marco?” Duo asked, voice low but pitched to carry. The Sweeper managed not to do a visible double-take, and paused by their group, pretending to scan the empty hold.

“We’re short one,” he said under his breath. “All the earlier trips took multiples of ten, and we should have ninety-four left; ninety-two slaves, and you two. There’s only ninety-three. One’s missing.”

“Ah. That.” Duo rubbed his nose, eyeing ‘Cat’, who was smiling sweetly at nothing. “Nobody’s missing. I’m not sure exactly where he **is** , but he’s not missing.”

“Do we need to wait for him to get back or something?” Marco asked nervously. “’Cause I don’t really wanna hang around, y’know?”

“Nope. Dude is dead.”

“Oooookay then,” Marco said, slightly wide-eyed, and walked stiffly off to the end of the line.

“At least, I assume he’s dead,” Duo said to ‘Cat’. Her smile widened. “Where’d you put him?”

“Maintenance hatch,” she said blandly, indicating one corner of the hold with a slight movement of her chin. “Sealed nice and tight. They won’t find him until the next optics check cycle, which isn’t due for about a month.”

“Yeeeeuch,” he said, quietly but fervently, and her smile broadened even further.

\----------

“Aw man,” Duo said as soon as they boarded the pinnace for the last slave transfer. “I’m gonna get yelled at.”

“Why?” Trowa asked.

Duo jerked one thumb at the name and numbers emblazoned on the front bulkhead of the cabin. “This is the _Hellscream_ ’s pinnace, which means we’re going to my brother’s ship. He didn’t know I was going with you, but I bet he found out about five minutes after we boarded. He is **not** gonna be happy with me.” He snickered, clearly unrepentant. “It won’t last.”

“Brother?” ‘Cat’ asked sharply.

“Yup!” He flopped comfortably into a seat in the middle of one row, leaning back and ignoring the restraints. “Solo and Duo Ramirez y Maxwell-- man, I’m doing a lot of introductions today. My brother’s Solo, I’m Duo. Pleased to meet you.”

“So you’re **not** Audubon Ballroom,” she said, standing stiffly in the aisle.

“He is,” Duo clarified, pointing to Trowa as the agent sat next to him and started finger-combing his hair back into place. “We run a Q-ship, pirate hunting. Well, three Q-ships now, we’re starting our own little fleet,” he grinned. “We caught this pirate, and it turned out that Trowa was on board undercover, and he told us about the slave ship on the way, and, well. There you go. It’s not like we could just sail off and leave you guys once we knew about you.”

“…I guess that’s okay then,” she said, sitting down next to Trowa and buckling in.

“Hey, just because I’m not from the Ballroom doesn’t mean I’m not a good guy, Cat,” he protested. “That is your name, right? Cat?”

“My designation is C dash twenty-five A slash nineteen dash two slash six,” she said mechanically, and stuck out her tongue. The black lines of the bar code were stark against her flesh, much neater than Trowa’s corrupted inherited pattern. “I get called Cat sometimes.”

“…Ooookay,” Duo said warily. “Do you **want** to be called Cat?”

She looked blankly at him, seeming confused for the first time since they’d met. “I don’t understand. What’s that got to do with it?”

“Everything, now,” he shrugged, stretching his legs out. “You’re free. You can do what you want, and part of that involves picking what name you want to be called. I’m not going to call you by a bunch of numbers, because you’re a person, not a-- a spare part, or something like that,” he went on, remembering the faulty batch of tuners. “If you want to be called Cat, I’ll call you Cat. If you want to use a different name, I’ll call you that.”

The other slaves were listening intently as the last Sweepers filed on board and closed the hatch. The blonde slave woman -- ex-slave, now -- frowned slightly, biting her lip. “I don’t know yet,” she said after a pause. “I think… I’d like ‘Cat’ to be **part** of my name, but not all of it. It’ll do for now.”

“Cool. There are a lot of names and surnames that start with ‘cat’ or have it in there somewhere,” Duo said easily, buckling in as one of the Sweepers gave him a pointed look. “Catriona, or Catherine, or Ducati, or, um, Cato… hell, we’ll get you a book if you want.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said, and turned to Trowa in an obvious attempt to change the subject. “What line are you?”

“My mother is unmodified, from Erewhon,” he said easily. “My father is K-line. He took the name Trevor Barton -- Trevor, after a helpful officer on the ship who freed him, and Barton after a fictional archer he read about.”

“What do the lines mean?” Duo asked curiously. “That guy Cat was fighting was V-line, what’s that about?”

“V-line are designed as combat specialists,” Trowa explained. “K-line are personal servants and entertainers, acrobats and so on. C-line are sex slaves.”

Duo’s eyes widened and he looked back at Cat, who hadn’t apparently reacted.

“They’re also supposed to be the most submissive line,” Trowa added dryly, “but it’s fairly obvious that Mesa and Manpower haven’t got **that** part of the genetic design even close to right. A fairly high percentage of Audubon Ballroom action team members started out in a C-line batch, and at least half of them ran away and found us by themselves instead of being rescued by someone else.”

At **that** , Cat’s mouth curved up in a quiet, smug smile, and Duo swallowed hard, blinking to get his expression back under control. “Gotcha.”

“Where are we going?” Cat asked, still smiling to herself. “A Ballroom base? I’d be… interested in talking to someone there.”

_I just bet you would,_ Duo thought. All the slaves seemed to be watching their conversation now, some openly, most surreptitiously, and he raised his voice slightly to carry. “We’re going to a Sweepers base, actually. From there, we can get transport to wherever you want to go -- Manticore, Haven, Andermani Empire, Beowulf, heck, we can call in someone official from the Solarian League if you want to move there, though they move slow as molasses and you’ll probably end up staying with us for a few months while they decide how to handle the request. I dunno where Trowa’s going after this, but hell, our main corporation is based around salvage and **transport** , so we can work it out. If you want to stay put for a while and think about it first, or stay put long-term even, we’re expanding and could probably find you a job with us,” he shrugged. _You generally, as in all you ex-slaves,_ he added silently to himself, watching her. _Not you **personally** , I hope, because holy crap are you one worrying person to have around, Cat-lady. And I am not going to say that out loud._

“I might be sticking around for a while, if you have space and facilities for one ex-undercover agent to take a break while my superiors decide what to do with me next,” Trowa sighed, slumping down in his seat and relaxing for the first time since Duo had seen him on screen, holding a gun on his supposed shipmates. “I have a lot of back pay coming to me, so I can definitely afford a proper holiday.”

“Dude, after this I don’t think any Sweeper’s going to take your money,” Duo told him, scrunching down comfortably and stretching his legs out as he watched the front viewscreen; on it, the _Guppy_ was turning towards the hyper limit and accelerating frantically, gravity wedge distorting her outlines into a multicoloured smear. “Thanks to you, we captured one ship without firing a shot, took out a second without getting shot at, and pulled off what’s probably the neatest rescue ever. We’ve got bragging material for **years** now! You can have a **free** proper holiday, we’ll lose messages for you if they decide on your next mission too soon and you want to delay going back to work, and if you want to come on a few pirate-punching missions just to keep your hand in you’ll be welcome on the _Deathscythe_ any time.”

“…I think I’d like that,” Trowa said, sounding a little surprised, and closed his eyes. By the time they docked with the _Hellscream_ , he was sound asleep.


	2. Trans-Shipment

Duo walked into the _Toolbox_ ’s exercise room just as Cat tried to take Trowa’s head off with a flying kick, missed, and went spinning into the padded wall as he redirected her momentum with a hefty shove.

“Better,” Trowa said calmly, shaking his head to settle his ruffled hair back into its smooth fall over one eye. “You’re still telegraphing your moves, though.”

“Nobody else would spot it,” she argued, rolling back to her feet and working one shoulder, rubbing the joint with her other hand. “If I can take everyone by surprise except Audubon Ballroom action team members, what does it matter? I’m not going to be trying to kill **them**.”

“Duo would spot it,” he shrugged, and the Q-ship captain held up both hands in negation.

“Hey, whoa, don’t drag me into this! And I really hope Cat’s not going to be trying to kill me either, just saying,” Duo added hastily.

“I bet you he wouldn’t,” Cat sniffed, ignoring him.

“Bet you he would,” Trowa replied.

“I bet I don’t want to test this theory. Oh look, I win! We can stop speculating noWHOAH!”

“He ducked,” the Ballroom agent pointed out, voice and expression perfectly deadpan. “I win. You need to work on not telegraphing your moves.”

Cat sighed and rolled her eyes. “Fine. Whatever.”

Crouched on the floor with one arm raised to block the kick that had been aimed at his head, Duo looked from one to the other with an exasperated expression. “Can we **not** try to maim the guy who walks in to give you good news, okay? In fact, can we not try to maim anybody who hasn’t agreed to be part of your training program? I’d appreciate it!” Behind him, Shinigami strolled into the room and made a huffing noise, glaring pointedly at Cat.

“I wasn’t going to **maim** you.”

“Sure looked like you were going to,” he grumbled, standing up and sidling away from her. “Do you actually want the news, or should I just plan to stay out of range and let you find out what’s up on your own?”

“News, please,” Trowa said politely, picking up a towel and starting to mop sweat off his face; that seemed to signal the end of the training session, and Cat blew her fringe out of her eyes with an annoyed huff of breath that sounded so much like Shinigami, Duo had to look to make sure it hadn’t been him again.

“We’ve gotten word back from Manticore,” he said, directing the sentence at Trowa but keeping a surreptitious eye on Cat to make sure she wasn’t going to have another try. “Long message with lots of flowery language, boils down to ‘we would be delighted to offer refugee status and eventual citizenship to any ex-slaves who want to move here, benefits, training, therapy, yadda yadda you name it, we’ll happily send a Navy ship to pick them up if it’s not convenient for you to come all the way here, aren’t you nice people’. They seem kinda enthusiastic about the idea,” he grinned.

“Better than the Havenites,” Cat sniffed.

“There was a definite flavour of ‘oh God, not more proles on the Dole’ to their response,” Trowa agreed. “It’s probably a good thing not many wanted to go there. Do we know how many are intending to go to Manticore, yet?”

“More than went to Haven, but still not a lot,” Duo shrugged. “About thirty-five, though more might put their hands up to go now that we’re going to be setting up a trip there. Most seem to want to stay with the Sweepers, actually, and about half a dozen have asked about joining the _Deathscythe_ ’s crew.” His grin turned sheepish, and he tugged awkwardly at his plaited hair. “Hilde says she’s got a bunch who want to serve on the _Forsaken_ , same with Solo and _Hellscream_. I think we made an impression.”

“Of course you did,” Trowa said reasonably. “Have you got room for them?”

“Are you kidding me?! We could take ten times as many and still be technically short-handed in some departments!” He threw his arms out in an emphatic gesture and started to pace, gesturing enthusiastically. “I mean, we’ve got zero personnel redundancy. None. Zip. If we lose somebody, we’ve got **no** backups and people will have to cover for them while still performing their own roles, which I guarantee you is gonna cause problems. We’re doing as much as we can with computerisation and automation, plus consolidating controls so one person can run multiple stations instead of having fifteen people in each weapons bay or whatever to push buttons, but there’s reasons why honest-to-God military ships have huge crews and do tons of things by hand instead of our way. They’ve got a lot more ability to reallocate personnel and work around damage on the fly than we do. If something breaks it’s gonna be bad, and in combat it’s gonna break all right, seeing as how the whole **point** of combat is to break the other guy’s ship before he breaks yours. Talk to me about the time all our internal communications went out-- wait, no, don’t talk to me about it, talk to someone else, I still get way too pissed off remembering it to want to tell the story, but it was pretty epic levels of suck and nearly got us all **dead**. A’course, that was because the first _Deathscythe_ was a converted freighter, pure civilian design built with no consideration for durability in battle, and the new three have been designed properly from the keel up so that particular system can’t FUBAR that way any more, but that doesn’t mean--”

Duo looked up in the middle of his rant and realised that Trowa and Cat were watching him, one with a faint smile and the other with a blatant scowl, and broke off, blushing. “Aheh. I may have some fairly strong opinions on the subject. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologise,” Trowa assured him, smile widening a hair. “They’re **interesting** opinions.”

“If you’ve got such a bad personnel shortage, why did you go from one ship to three instead of two?” Cat asked. “Two would have made better sense.”

“Eh, it was a tradeoff,” Duo told her, answering the question while ignoring her scornful tone of voice. “When you’re dealing with small fleets - like, anything under fifteen or twenty ships at a time - adding one more ship doesn’t increase your strength linearly. It’s exponential. The difference between two and three ships isn’t a fifty percent increase in capability; it’s more like two **hundred** percent. We ran the numbers a few different ways, and, well… we decided to take the slight hit in efficiency, jump straight to a fleet of three, and recruit up to strength as fast as we could, instead of going with two ships that might be more efficiently run but had a **way** higher chance of getting blown out of space before we could finance our next expansion. Plus, if we hadn’t given Hilde her own ship, Solo and I were gonna have to decide who got her as XO through gladiatorial combat or something, since we couldn’t share her any more.”

“Oh. I suppose that’s reasonable, then.”

Duo bit back a snarky retort with an effort - _**So** glad it meets with your approval, Madam Tactician!_ \- and Trowa eyed him thoughtfully for a moment, then turned to Cat.

“That’s something else you’re going to have to work on,” he said, and she blinked, visibly surprised.

“What? We’ve stopped sparring - what do you mean?”

“It’s generally considered a good idea to be polite to people who can help you,” he said in an uncharacteristically hard voice. Cat blushed angrily, opening her mouth to retort, but he cut her off with an upraised hand and went on. “Since you can’t always tell in advance who may or may not be able to help you in the future, it’s a good idea to be polite to everyone - and being rude to someone who’s already helped you is frankly uncivilised. You’re C-line, so you would have been given the full suite of etiquette training; you know how to behave well in society. You’re **choosing** not to, and that’s a major tactical error if you want to be even minimally useful to the Audubon Ballroom.”

“ **Slavers** wanted me to act that way!” she raged, fists clenched. “ **Mesa** wanted me to act that way! Are you telling me to roll over and be a, a **good slave** for the **normals**?!”

“Mesa trained you to act that way because it’s how **everyone** is expected to behave,” Trowa said sternly. “No, I’m not telling you to follow the bits about subservience, or the training about how to behave in front of your owner in private! The full suite has public modules too, about how to act when nobody is supposed to know you’re a slave. **That’s** what I’m talking about. It’s your choice as to whether you want to use it or not, but don’t discard it just because it came from Mesa. Right now, **everything** you know came from Mesa, right down to how to use cutlery and put on your own clothes. Mesan nurses taught you how to walk and talk. Are you going to discard it all and start over as a blank slate?”

She didn’t answer, shaking with anger and embarrassment, and he went on in a gentler voice.

“Manners and polite behaviour affect how other people see you. How they react to you. Whether or not they think of you favourably, whether or not they like you, whether or not they’re inclined to do things for you. It’s a **tool** , Cat, think of it that way. If you’re nice to people when you’re out on a mission, you’ll get let into places you wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to go, invited to parties where you can get closer to your targets, that sort of thing. And when something goes wrong, people who like you won’t think of you of a suspect - or if they do, they might even cover up evidence to protect you. From a purely pragmatic point of view, being polite and nice gets you benefits out of all proportion to the amount of effort expended.”

“Uh… he’s right,” Duo said apologetically, and shrugged when she turned towards him with wide, accusing eyes. “I don’t wanna dogpile on you or anything, Cat, I figure you’re a decent person and everyone’s been cutting you a **lot** of slack because if anyone deserves it you do, but… well, the day you said you’d be heading to Earth to join the Audubon Ballroom cells there, there were enough sighs of relief to change the air pressure. Nobody hates you or anything, but nobody wants you to stick around either, ’cause you haven’t exactly been making friends.”

She whirled and stalked off without another word, snatching up her own towel from the bench as she passed, and Duo winced as she stamped out the door. “Maybe I shoulda kept my mouth shut,” he muttered.

Trowa shook his head. “No; she needed to hear it.” He patted Duo’s shoulder comfortingly, then slung his towel around his neck and stretched. “Oof!”

“Good workout?”

“Mmm. She hit me harder than I admitted a few times,” he said ruefully, feeling at a tender spot over his ribs. “In some ways she’s a good student - she learns amazingly fast, and the C-line physical mods are well suited to some styles of combat - and in other ways she’s the worst student I’ve ever taught. She won’t take correction, and she’s got far too high an opinion of her own abilities.”

“She’s good, but not that good?” Duo asked.

“Exactly. I think she’s spent most of her life working around the Mesans, playing the perfect demure slave while plotting and scheming and teaching herself the skills she thought she needed to know to escape, and she got away with so much… she thinks she’ll always get away with everything. I need to get it into her head that she’s not all that **now** , instead of letting her find out that things really can go wrong when she’s out on her first mission,” he finished, mouth twisting. “By the way, thanks for helping with that. I think it’s finally sinking in.”

“I’d be happier about it if you’d warned me I was going to be used as a training dummy first, but you’re welcome,” Duo said wryly.

Trowa eyed him sideways from under his hair. “…I knew you’d dodge,” he said eventually. “You see things, and what you don’t see you **feel** … and what you don’t pick up on, Shinigami tells you about.”

Duo’s expression turned wary, then blank. “I’ve got good reflexes, dude, but that’s about it. Hand-to-hand isn’t my thing.”

The Ballroom agent shrugged, almost visibly dropping the subject. “Fair enough, given that you don’t need it much. So, are you taking the Manticorans up on their offer to pick up their new immigrants? And do you have an ETD yet?”

“We were actually planning on doing a run through the Saginaw sector for a proper shakedown cruise, seeing as how we had to cut the first one short after we picked everyone up,” Duo told him, relaxing slightly. “If we loop around into Manticoran territory first, that lets us come into the sector from an unexpected angle, and we can meet up with their Navy taxi at Reevesport or something.”

“Do you **need** to come into the sector from an unexpected angle?” Trowa asked curiously.

The Q-ship captain grinned, showing far too many teeth for it to look harmless. “Oh, we’re getting to that point,” he said, almost purring in satisfaction. “We’ve already given this sector a rep for being somewhere you do not want to fuck with merchanters, and some little birds have told us that pirates in the neighbouring sectors are starting to think twice about jacking any ship that comes out of here, especially if it’s flying alone. Three ships coming in from Manticoran space, though… we’ll have a good chance of getting some bites.”

Trowa felt his eyebrows going up in surprise, and let it show. “You’ve given a whole **sector** a reputation for being bad for pirates? With **one** ship?!”

“Hey, the _Deathscythe_ Mark 1 was **special** , man,” Duo said, still-sharp grin contrasting oddly with his nostalgic tone. “Civilian conversion or not, we stuffed that baby with as many mods as we could invent and fit in the hull, and we regularly outshot two- and three-ship pirate groups. And you gotta consider the sector itself. There’s a grand total of four inhabited systems here in the Hillman sector, and three of ’em are Sweepers bases. We don’t have an actual planet - don’t want one, either - and our total population is about one-tenth of the numbers living in the sector capital, but **all** of us are spacers, so our influence in the sector outside of that one planet’s atmosphere is way out of proportion to our numbers. About forty percent of the sector’s trade is to or through us. Anyway, there used to be a normal amount of pirate activity around here, and we felt it pretty bad--”

“There’s a ‘normal’ amount for pirate activity?” Trowa couldn’t resist asking, and Duo snorted.

“There is in Silesia,” he said darkly, and Trowa shrugged reluctant agreement. “So when we started out, of course we started out right here - it was close to the _Toolbox_ and the other stations for resupply and so on, and every pirate we took out was one less ship picking on our friends and harassing our trade routes. We cleaned up like nobody’s business before they got the word around that there was a Q-ship patrolling the area, but eventually most of ’em moved out and we had to go a bit further to find anyone who was willing to take the bait any more.”

“With one ship?” Trowa repeated, still incredulous.

“Dude, you spent how long undercover on pirate ships again?”

“Eight years.”

“Then you know how heavily armed most pirate ships **aren’t** ,” Duo pointed out. “They don’t need more than one or two missile tubes to handle an unarmed merchie. Anything that can actually fight back, they don’t attack in the first place. There are a few that started out as diverted navy surplus, **those** have something worth calling a broadside, but they’ve almost never got enough missiles to reload more than once or twice. If we could handle a couple of broadsides - and we could! - after that we just had to stay out of laser range and pound ’em until they either blew up or surrendered. The _Pretty Pretty Prick_ had a decent broadside, sure, what was it? Five missile tubes and two lasers per side, plus a chase tube? How many missiles did you actually have in the magazines?”

“…Twenty-six,” Trowa admitted.

“Yeah, and they were crap, too,” Duo grinned. “ **Way** obsolete, and when we checked them out to see if they were worth using it turned out three of ’em probably wouldn’t’ve gone off if you’d fired ’em. Red lights all over the diagnostics. Your maintenance crews musta been pretty useless.”

“Blame Lopez, not me! If I’d been in charge, we would have been in much better shape. And on a different side,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

“Heh. True. Well, the first _Deathscythe_ didn’t have any lasers - we spent that part of the energy budget on souped-up sidewalls - but it had **ten** tubes in each broadside, and we had magazine space for over three hundred missiles. Never could afford to carry more than two hundred, though.”

“Oh.” Trowa blinked once or twice, mentally revising his estimate of the relevant force levels. “Now I understand. …And the new ships are better?”

“Wellllll,” Duo drawled, eyes glittering, “let’s just say that we have a **way** bigger energy budget than before. And enough cash to fill the magazines.”

“And a shakedown cruise coming up.”

“Yeah! It’s gonna be **awesome**! Are you coming?”

“Eh?”

“Hey, I said you could come along pirate-punching if you wanted to, and I meant it. You can help us deliver some new citizens to Manticore - they’re generally cool with Ballroom agents, I think, but it’s probably best if we don’t introduce you--”

“We try not to strain the limits of their tolerance,” Trowa agreed, smirking. “I’m sure they’d prefer not to know.”

“--then have a nice slow three-week cruise through Saginaw, passing through all the best places to get ambushed on our way to Lutrell, where there’s an eatery Howard swears is the best place he’s ever found to get genuine dirtside food without actually going dirtside. I dunno about that, but what I **do** know is that their manapua and jalebi are worth going that far for, and they brew their own beer. My treat. Plus, it gives Cat about a month to simmer down,” Duo added, eyeing the door she’d left by warily.

“Oh, twist my arm,” Trowa said, not quite deadpan. “I haven’t had jalebi for years, and I haven’t had **good** jalebi since before I went undercover. That plus time to let Cat think things through equals yes, please, I would love to come pirate-punching. When do we leave?”

“Day after tomorrow, if everybody’s ready,” Duo grinned. “I’ll take care of getting the ships good to go; d’you mind making sure all the ex-slaves who want to head to Manticore are packed and so on? Plus there’s a bunch who’ve been making noises about **maybe** going to Manticore, they’re going to need to make up their minds in kind of a hurry.”

“Will do.” Trowa waved two fingers in a mock salute and bent to pick up a few scattered items as Duo bounced out. When he straightened up, hands full of blunt practice knives, Shinigami was sitting quietly between him and the door, watching him.

“…Yes?” he asked after a moment, resisting the urge to either start a staring contest or look away from the treecat’s intense yellow gaze.

Shinigami’s eyes narrowed slightly, and his ears tilted backwards. His tail lashed, once, then returned to stillness.

“If this is about me noticing that you and Duo communicate a lot more than can be accounted for verbally or by body language--”

Yellow eyes narrowed further.

“--I don’t intend to tell anyone.”

The ’cat held his gaze for a moment longer, then blinked and flicked his tail - a relaxed motion, this time, and accompanied by an innocent-sounding chirrup - before turning and walking out.

Trowa let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding, feeling a cold drop of sweat trickle down his spine. _I think it’s a very good thing that I was telling the truth…_

* * * * *

When the small fleet of Q-ships left orbit heading for Manticoran territory, there were thirty-nine ex-slaves and one Audubon Ballroom not-currently-undercover agent on board, tucked away into various rooms in the crowded internal spaces. Most of the ex-slaves were hot-bunking with crew members who were on the small third watch and therefore wouldn’t be in their beds during ship’s night; Trowa found himself down the hall from Duo’s cabin on the _Deathscythe_ , in one of the few genuinely vacant rooms.

“Duo.”

“Mmmph?”

“Isn’t the captain’s cabin traditionally supposed to be **larger** than everyone else’s quarters?” Trowa asked in a mild voice, leaning on the door and looking around the cramped room. It was almost pathologically neat in the way people who’d been raised in space often were, with every single loose item clipped into a rack or tidied away into a storage compartment, and yet still managed to look chaotic and messy. It was the completely uncoordinated colours, he thought, and the fact that everything that wasn’t part of the ship or a piece of safety equipment seemed to be second-hand and very well used.

Duo snorted, spitting the cutting tool he’d been holding in his mouth out into one hand and making a final adjustment to the cables he was splicing. “It’s not like I need anything bigger!”

“Whether you need it or not, I think you’re supposed to have the space anyway, in case you want to entertain important guests or something. More to the point, **my** cabin is bigger. Why aren’t you in there? You’d at least have room for more book chips,” he suggested, gesturing to a rack that was crammed full of what seemed to be three quarters technical publications and one quarter novels.

“For one thing, we don’t get visitors much,” Duo grinned. “People either don’t know we’re a Q-ship, in which case there’s no way we’re inviting them on board, or else they **do** know we’re a Q-ship, and know not to expect anything fancy. For another thing, in the extremely unlikely event that we do end up with important guests on board, your cabin is where they’re going to stay.”

Trowa blinked. “I’m flattered, then. It does have a very comfortable bed.”

“Good to know!” There was a brief smell of hot glass and plastic as Duo fused the cables together, and the newly-installed screen blinked to life with ‘RECEIVING SIGNAL… PLEASE WAIT’. “C’mon c’mon c’mon, be a good little gadget, this is the third time I’ve tried to get you working, don’t make me have to get Grant to fix you…”

“It didn’t even get this far last time,” Trowa pointed out, hiding a smile. “Why didn’t Hauptmann Yards get it working before you left?”

“Ah, we put in a bunch of private mods once we got the ships home to the Toolbox,” Duo said absent-mindedly, drumming his fingers on the wall and watching the progress bar. “Stuff we weren’t about to give the Yards the plans for. This is one of ’em. The **last** one, if I can just get it to **work** \--!”

A scaled-down copy of the main bridge display popped briefly into view before being obscured with pink and purple static and warping sideways. After a few more seconds it started to scroll vertically, then disappeared and was replaced by ‘SIGNAL LOST’.

“Shit.”

“I don’t think it’s the screen,” Trowa said. “It’s displaying its own diagnostics just fine.”

“Yeah, but the server checks out fine, and we haven’t been able to find anything wrong with the cabling between here and there, so I was hoping that redoing the connection would fix it,” Duo sighed. “Crap, and other such comments.” Leaning sideways, he punched in a code on the bedside communicator and waited for the call to go through, staring up at the ceiling and drumming his fingers again.

//Yeah?//

“Hey, Grant, it’s Duo. I give up,” he said flatly.

//Told you your first two connections were fine, boy! It’s something in the server communication protocols.//

“Well if you could just **find** something wrong in the comms protocols, I wouldn’t be grasping at **straws** here,” Duo explained with exaggerated patience. “Fine, you win, I can’t fix it. Now would you please kick whatever bit of tech is refusing to play nice into behaving?”

//Working on it.// _*click*_

“Yeah, I’d appreciate-- did he seriously just disconnect on me?!”

“I think he did.”

“I would kick his ass if he wasn’t like three hundred years old,” Duo huffed, unconvincingly. “Seriously though, he can disconnect on me all he likes if he just fixes the damn tac screen repeater so I don’t have to bolt up to the bridge in my skivvies if we get an emergency in the middle of my night cycle. Whatever. Did you want anything in particular, or were you just sticking your head in to tell me my cabin isn’t captain-ish?” he continued, grinning at Trowa.

“Lexie sent me to tell you that you’re about to miss dinner. Again,” the taller man informed him, grinning back.

“What? There’s no way that took long enough for-- aw, crap!” Duo swore, checking the time. On cue, his stomach gurgled loudly. “Damnit, Shini, why didn’t you remind me?! …Shini?”

Trowa cleared his throat. “Probably because Shinigami is **not** missing dinner. He’s in the mess hall with a giant plate of rabbit and celery.”

The betrayed expression on Duo’s face before he catapulted himself out of his seat and ran down the corridor was hilarious.

\- - - - -

“I’m still pissed at you, y’know.”

Shinigami rolled over and eyed Duo with an unmistakeably smug expression, then burped.

“Oh, that was classy! Seriously, by the time I got there they were out of all the good stuff. I guess Lexie was serious when she told me she wasn’t going to save anything for me any more,” Duo said grumpily. “It’s not like anyone else eats raw rabbit, so sticking around to remind me wouldn’t have lost you **your** dinner.”

The treecat blinked lazily at him, and Duo received a series of images; Shini scolding him the last time he’d had to be reminded about a meal, a definite feeling of ‘no more, not again’, and a clear picture of Lexie eating celery.

“As if she’d take it all! Half the time she picks her own share out of her salad and gives it to you!”

A picture of Cheng-yi eating celery. A picture of Grant eating celery. A picture of Angus--

Duo flopped backwards in his chair and let his arms dangle, groaning in defeat. “Okay. **Okay**! Somebody among the many heinous celery-eating members of my crew **might** have eaten **some** of your serving of celery, despite knowing that you would have been **very upset** with them and probably taken lessons from Loki on how to get them back. The mere possibility of losing a piece of celery is sufficient to justify your abandonment of me to, y’know, actual hunger. All the celery is belong to you!” He cut himself off, grimacing, and reached out without looking to rub his partner behind the ears. “It’s not like extra celery is going to extend your range far enough to reach them, dude.”

Shinigami flattened his ears and looked away, not sending anything in return, and Duo sighed.

“I miss them too, buddy.”

He could still **feel** Solo and Loki, but it was just a vague awareness of their existence, a faint glow on the edge of his mind that he couldn’t even pin down to a direction; not the clear presence that had been part of his life since the day of their adoptions. Not enough to be a comfort. They’d known it was going to happen once they were in different ships, of course - for safety’s sake, even flying in ‘close formation’ meant keeping hundreds of kilometres away from the other ships in their little fleet. There was no possible way to stay within the five or so kilometres that was the absolute maximum range over which treecats could communicate. And they’d gone out of range of each other before, of course they had, plenty of times, but--

\--but it had always been with the knowledge that they would be back in range within hours. Days, at most. This time it was going to be for **weeks**.

Duo sighed again, looking sideways at Shinigami, who was curling up into a grumpy ball on his bed. His single, lonely, empty bed.

“Man, this is going to **suck**.”

* * * * *

“…and we will be rendezvousing with the Sweepers Q-ships _Deathscythe_ , _Forsaken_ , and _Hellscream_ in the Reevesport system in four days time. They will probably be using aliases,” the XO continued in his slightly nasal voice, “so in order to avoid breaking their cover those names are to be considered classified and we will wait for them to make the first contact. Our schedule then requires us to--”

One of the civilian officials seated at the briefing table snorted derisively, leaning back in his chair as if to separate himself from the discussion. “I sincerely doubt we’ll be keeping to schedule,” he drawled, rolling his eyes. “It’ll be a frank miracle if those Q-ships arrive on time, much less manage to transship the slaves efficiently. Excuse me, **ex** -slaves,” he corrected himself pointedly.

The XO stared expressionlessly at him for just slightly longer than was comfortable, then blinked. “What are you basing that evaluation on, sir?”

“Well, I mean, it’s obvious they can’t be **serious** ,” the man scoffed, gesturing towards the infopad in front of him. “What with names like that, and all.”

“ **Mister** Hamilton-Price,” the captain interjected, in a cool drawl that was the same high-class accent as the civilian’s but seemed somehow less grating, “you are currently on board Her Majesty’s Ship _Tallgeese_ , a name that seems silly to many but nevertheless has been placed on the List of Honor due to the courageous deeds performed by this ship’s predecessors. I can assure you--”

“Well, yes, but I mean, that’s different!” Hamilton-Price blustered, and one white-blond eyebrow lifted at the interruption.

“ **I can assure you** ,” the captain began again as the civilian stuttered into silence, “that while _Forsaken_ and _Hellscream_ are newly built, the _Deathscythe_ has amassed sufficient honours of its own for its record to stand proud against this or any other Manticoran ship’s. More to the point, Mr Hamilton-Price, I believe you were provided with a full briefing pack before this meeting. Did you **read** it?”

“Well-- I-- uh-- the **important** parts, certainly--”

“Generally speaking, Mr Hamilton-Price, information in a briefing pack is there because it is **all** important. At least, that holds true for briefing packs prepared by my officers,” the captain murmured with an amused look sideways at the XO, and a few quiet chuckles rose. “Right now, you might want to have a look at the section devoted to the Sweepers and their allied Q-ships. I suggest you jump straight to the tab marked ‘Bounties’,” he said, voice polite but implacably firm.

There was an uncomfortable pause as the immigration official picked up his infopad and stabbed angrily at the icons. Reaching the right section, he scanned down the length of the pad, then scrolled down… scrolled down again… and again…

…and again…

“Preposterous!” he snorted, tossing the pad back onto the table and crossing his arms. “That can’t possibly be accurate!”

“Actually, all those bounties were confirmed by the ship captains and base commanders to whom they delivered pirate crews,” the captain noted cheerfully. “We have rather stringent requirements for proof, not wanting to disburse Her Majesty’s funds without proper documentation. I might also note that this list is incomplete, containing as it does only the bounties that have been paid by Manticore. The _Deathscythe_ ’s co-captains do have a stated preference for delivering their captives to us, rather than to Silesian governments, but we share that honour with the Andermani Empire. Any bounties paid by them won’t appear in our records. So yes, Mr Hamilton-Price, these are **deathly** serious people we are dealing with,” he finished, mouth curling into a grim smile at the pun, “and I fully expect them to arrive on schedule unless they stop off on the way to catch a few more. Silly names notwithstanding.”

The chill silence following his speech was broken by one of Hamilton-Price’s colleagues, who raised a hand tentatively. “Er… Captain Merquise, do you know **why** they prefer to deliver pirates to us, rather than Silesians? Er, us and the Andermani, that is?”

“As a matter of fact, I do, Mr Spencer. While I haven’t met the gentlemen myself, other captains have reported that they say they don’t like turning pirates over to Silesian officials because they have a nasty tendency to turn around and let them go, occasionally selling them a new ship on their way out. Pirates given to us or the Andermani, however, are far more likely to stay locked up.”

“That’s a rather slanderous statement!” Hamilton-Price huffed.

“I’m merely repeating their words, Mr Hamilton-Price, but I have to say that observed fact does accord with their prejudices. Many Silesian officials **do** have efficient little deals going on with the local pirates, often including literal escape clauses.” He coolly stared him into silence again, then turned back to Spencer with a slight smile. “Apparently they also avoid turning bounties over to Havenite ships, because the money doesn’t always show up in return, and when it does it’s often credit notes only redeemable in Havenite space.”

Possibly stupid, uncrushable, or both, Hamilton-Price muttered something about “unprincipled mercenaries”, loud enough to be heard.

“Well, yes, they **are** mercenaries in a way,” Captain Merquise replied, aristocratic drawl thickening as he got more annoyed. “That would be the whole point of bounties, after all; finance the people who are good enough to take care of some of the problems the Navy would dearly love to clean up, but can’t always catch, don’t’cher know. It’d be a trifle hypocritical to offer bounties and then look down on the people who accept ’em, them not having the benefit of a governmental payroll an’ all - and even those of us privileged to be paid a nice salary by Her Majesty get prize money, essentially bounties under a different name. I take issue with the ‘unprincipled’ part, though. If they were indeed unprincipled, they’d **be** pirates, not be huntin’ ’em, and I have no reservations about statin’ that I personally would not be happy to find myself and my crew on the other end of a fight involvin’ these people!”

Half an hour later, at the end of the briefing (which hadn’t gotten any better as it went along), the XO ushered the last civilians politely out of the room and then dropped back into his chair next to the captain with an exasperated noise.

“How the hell do you manage to stay polite with those idiots, Zechs?”

“Was I polite?” Captain Merquise asked mildly. “Damn. I rather hoped I was getting fairly rude there at the end.”

“‘Rude’ and ‘coldly contemptuous’ are not synonyms. You were doing the second one rather well.”

“Ah, well, that’s all right then. And at least only one of them is really an idiot. God help those poor people who are going to have him as their liaison to the Department of Immigration, though.”

“ **They’ll** be fine,” the XO snorted. “As long as they don’t mind him treating them as fragile symbols of man’s oppression of man who need to be sheltered from the brutish myrmidons running this ship, he’ll fall over himself to get them everything they need.”

“Here’s hoping none of them burst his bubble by stating a desire to join the brutish myrmidons before he’s finished their paperwork, then,” Zechs said meaningfully.

His XO smirked. “Oh, I think I can drop a few hints and get them to keep any such violent desires under wraps until then,” he murmured, and stuck out a barcoded tongue.

“Put that away, Yui, or I’ll have you up on charges of conduct unbecoming an officer.”

“Would you really? It would be an excellent excuse for refusing your sister’s latest invitation.”

Zechs dropped his head into his hands in a gesture expressing utter despair, one long strand of platinum-blond hair that had escaped his neat queue falling decoratively over his fingers. “Oh, God,” he moaned, voice muffled. “Not again. What’s the occasion this time?”

“One of her fiance’s sisters’ birthdays. I forget which one. Irene, maybe? Is there an Irene in the girlpack? I think the name started with I, anyway.”

“No Irene, no,” Zechs said thoughtfully, emerging from the shelter of his hands. “There’s an Iria, though. I’m pretty sure she’s the only one whose name starts with I, and she’s one of the sane ones.” A hopeful note crept into his voice. “I don’t suppose you’d consider accepting the invitation? It’d take the pressure off me for a while, at least, and Relena knows you’re already taken so she won’t **really** be expecting you to date her.”

“She might be sane, but the others will all be there too,” his XO said firmly, shaking his head. “No.”

“I’d be willing to bribe you.”

“You haven’t enough money to pay me to get within reach of those harpies.”

“Oh come on, Heero, I know all the entailed properties went to Relena when I took myself out of the line of succession, but I kept all my personal inheritances--”

“You haven’t enough,” Heero repeated firmly, blue eyes amused above his serious expression. “Relena hasn’t got enough. **Winner** hasn’t got enough.”

Zechs sighed, propping his chin on one fist and gazing at his officer with an expression that was almost a pout. “Don’t suppose you’d obey if I ordered you to go, either.”

“Zechs - **sir** \- if being convicted on charges of conduct unbecoming an officer and locked in a stockade is the only way for me to get out of this or any similar invitation, I will cheerfully **lick** you to bring those charges on.”

“Eugh! Not necessary!” the captain assured him hastily. “Damnation, you really are serious, aren’t you?”

Heero grinned. “My fiancé would be deeply offended if I got myself in trouble with the Winner girlpack.”

“Can’t say I blame-- wait, fiancé? You two finally made it official? Congratulations!”

The faint blush looked odd on Heero’s face as he nodded, smile turning almost shy. “We, uh, haven’t set a date yet, but--”

“Exigencies of Her Majesty’s service and so on,” Zechs said understandingly, waving off the explanation. “Remember, I was an interested ringside spectator for all the hoops you two had to jump through the last time you wanted to coordinate your leaves, and we **still** got called back to patrol early.”

“Waste of all those signatures,” Heero muttered, still blushing. “At least we got a week.”

“Well, tell Rafi that when you need time off for the wedding, I’m happy to pry some more signatures out of the Admiralty, and I have contacts in Fortress Command as well. Call it part of my wedding present to you both.”

* * * * *

“Duo, did-- ah. Excuse me, I was looking for Captain Maxwell.”

“Ain’t got one of those on board, boy,” the grey-haired man sitting at Duo’s desk replied without looking around, bent over a complicated bit of wiring with a magnifying loupe in one eye. “We’ve got an idealistic young fool named Duo in charge, though. Said he was going down to the mess hall for some coffee, should be back soon.”

“You must be Grant,” Trowa said dryly, recognising the voice, and the elderly man snorted.

“Good to know you can see the obvious, there. I can too, so you must be Barton. Anything in particular you wanted?”

“Nothing urgent. Duo said he was going to have a nap, but when I saw the door open I thought he must still be awake--”

“And you’d be right there as well,” Grant interrupted, reaching for another tool. “Should be napping and isn’t. Decided to work on the screen instead, called me to help, and is going to substitute coffee for rest. Again.” He shot one quick look over his shoulder to where Trowa was still leaning in the doorway; the Ballroom agent got a brief impression of a ridiculously pointed nose and sharp eyes, one magnified to disconcerting size through the loupe, before he turned back to his wiring. “Boy doesn’t sleep well without his brother near. Neither does Solo, but I gather he’s worked out better ways to deal with it than ignoring it and loading up on caffeine.”

“Hm.” Trowa scratched thoughtfully at his chin, and started to push away from the door jamb. “In that case, I should probably go.”

“Wrong. You won’t keep him up longer by being here, if that’s what you’re worried about; he’ll stay up until he falls over if he decides to, no matter who’s here or not. If you keep him talking, though, he’ll drink less coffee and won’t get in my way while I re-wire this, and if I get it working he **might** actually decide to have that nap after all.”

“…I guess I’m staying, then,” Trowa said, amused, and settled back against the wall to wait.

They heard Duo coming back before he came into view; the swish of a lift door opening further down the corridor, then an animated discussion moving closer. Animated, Trowa noted, but largely one-sided, mostly Duo’s fast patter with the occasional quiet chirp or ‘bleek’ noise in reply. Shinigami came into view first, strolling around the curve of the corridor and flirting his tail in greeting, and then Duo bounced after him and stopped short, the carafe of coffee in his hand sloshing dangerously.

“Oh, hey, Trowa!” he said, shooting a slightly annoyed glance at his treecat partner. “Wasn’t expecting you. Something up?”

“I wasn’t expecting to talk to you either, but the door was open and Grant told me to stick around,” Trowa said calmly, nodding towards the older man as he straightened up from his comfortable lean, then turning to smile at the treecat. “Hello, Shinigami. I wanted to give you both a heads-up,” he continued, looking back up at Duo. “Some of the younger ex-slaves are planning to ask you how they can get their own ‘pet fluffy kitties’.”

The quotation marks around ‘pet fluffy kitties’ were audible as Trowa’s voice turned dry, and Duo spluttered helplessly for a moment. Shinigami started making the half-sneeze, half-cough noise that was the treecat equivalent of raucous laughter, loud enough that Duo had to raise his voice when he got it back. “Seriously?! What the hell do they think Shini is, a stuffed toy?!”

“More like an Earth cat, I think,” Trowa shrugged. “One asked how much treecats cost in pet shops. I tried to explain that they’re sentient, but I think they’re stuck on the fact that they don’t talk.”

“Man,” Duo muttered, looking rather offended. “They are **so** not paying attention if they haven’t realised that treecats are not dumb cats! Talking or no talking!”

“Definitely,” Trowa agreed, meeting Shinigami’s eyes. He was still cough-sniggering, eyes bright with amusement, and walked unsteadily over to sit next to Trowa’s feet and pat him sympathetically on the knee. “Thanks. It was a bit frustrating.”

“If you couldn’t get it into their heads, I dunno how I’m going to manage,” Duo shrugged, carrying the coffee into his cabin and rummaging in a storage compartment for a pack of recyclable cups.

“Mighta been better if you hadn’t warned him,” Grant put in, still bent over the desk. “Duo’s better at being rude when he’s taken by surprise. Might be what it takes to drum it through their skulls.”

“True. If I’ve just sabotaged your future argument, I apologise,” Trowa said, accepting a cup from Duo and sitting down next to him on the bed. Shinigami jumped up between them and settled down, managing to drape himself across both their laps.

“If you do that when they’re around, **you’re** going to sabotage the argument,” Duo told the ’cat, half-heartedly shoving at him before giving up and scratching behind his ears. “Petting hog.” He swigged half his coffee, then paused, eyeing the distance between him and the carafe sitting on the small table. “And I bet you’re not going to move when I want a refill, either…”

Shinigami bleeked smugly and stretched, setting multiple sets of claws firmly into both Duo and Trowa’s shipknits, and Trowa shrugged helplessly as the long-haired captain turned towards him. “I think he’s comfortable. I also think that if we try to kick him off, we’re not going to be comfortable.”

“Don’t look at me,” Grant growled, making another tiny adjustment. “Busy here.”

“Traitor!”

“That’d be mutineer, actually, and I don’t think sticking to my job instead of getting you a drink really qualifies.”

“You’re all against me,” Duo announced dramatically, slumping back on the mattress in a ‘woe is me’ pose, one hand draped across his forehead, the other carefully balancing his coffee on his stomach. “Except you. You’d get me coffee if you could get up, wouldn’t you?” he wheedled, making big eyes at Trowa.

“It’s kind of out of my hands,” he shrugged, sitting very still as Shinigami’s claws clenched a little harder… and not actually answering the question. “I seem to have been designated ‘Treecat Ass Support’, and I don’t think I’m allowed to resign from the post.”

Duo cracked up laughing, and Shinigami made a few more wet sneezing sounds. “I think you’re right there. Hey, I got it! I’ll loan Shini to the kids for the voyage, tell them it’s so they can get used to looking after a treecat, and by the time we get to Reevesport it won’t matter whether or not they think he’s intelligent because they won’t **want** one! It’s brilliant --OW! Claws!”

Twenty minutes later, Shinigami slid off Trowa’s lap as he carefully reached across and took the empty cup out of Duo’s slack hand. “Well, that worked,” he murmured, and Shinigami chirped quiet agreement as he curled up next to his sleeping partner.

“So did this,” Grant announced, leaning back in the chair and cracking his knuckles. On the screen in front of him was a modified copy of the bridge tactical display, with enlarged text and simplified symbols to be readable on the smaller scale. “About time, too.”

“What was the problem?”

“No idea,” Grant said bluntly as he shooed Trowa out of the room and shut the door behind them, dimming the lights to half on the way. “I just kept replacing components along the chain until it worked. Figure I’ve got until Duo wakes up to come up with some convincing bullshit explanation.”

* * * * *

Solo leaned back in his station chair to stretch, bumping against Loki and getting a sleepy grumble in return. “Sorry, Furball,” he said affectionately, rubbing the back of his head against the treecat’s furry side. “It’s nearly time for Hilde to come on duty, then we can go get something to eat and you can nap in comfort.”

Loki yawned, made a vaguely agreeing noise, and settled down on the back of Solo’s chair again. Solo stretched - more cautiously this time - and wiggled his feet in his boots, working out the kinks left by eight hours of near-constant sitting in a chair that, while comfortable, wasn’t exactly a good lounging spot.

The three ships were operating on staggered schedules, internal clocks set so that one was always in ‘day cycle’ with most of its personnel at their posts, one waking up from night shift, and one winding down towards sleep. Right now the _Hellscream_ was reaching the end of its turn at full alert, most _Forsaken_ personnel should be having breakfast, and _Deathscythe_ was in the middle of its night cycle. In about half an hour, Hilde should be starting her shift on bridge and would be calling him to take over control--

His comms screen pinged with an external call and he slapped the ‘accept’ button without looking to see who it was. “Hey Hilde! You’re early-- what the hell are you doing up?”

Duo grinned at him out of the screen. //Jeez, I get no appreciation. Here I am calling you in the middle of my night cycle--//

“I noticed.” Solo took a closer look and frowned, lowering his voice. “You look like shit. Are you sleeping at all?”

//Fuck, I have Grant and Shini manipulating me into napping and now you have to mother-hen me? Yes, I’ve been sleeping.// Duo rolled his eyes, which had the unfortunate result of showing off just how bad the dark shadows under them were getting. //I’m fine. I’m just bored, so I figured I’d call.//

_You might be sleeping a bit, but obviously not much… and if I push it you’ll just switch off and go sulk. With more coffee,_ Solo added, making a mental note of the obviously well-used mug in front of Duo. “Well, you have reasonable timing, since I’m bored too,” he admitted. “Anything interesting happening over there?”

//Finally got the tac repeater in my cabin running,// Duo told him, relaxing slightly as his brother made no further argument. //Grant says it was an interaction between a miswritten line of code in the server and the effects of slight overheating in an off-spec section of conduit, but I call bullshit.//

“Yeah, that sounds like technobabble all right. Plausible technobabble, but still.”

//He’s off his game if that’s the best he can come up with. Oh! I nearly forgot, Trowa warned me about something the younger kids we’re transporting came up with--// Duo broke off to snicker, smothering a yawn behind one hand, then gulped coffee. //Bleh, old **and** cold. I need to brew a new pot, gimme a minute--//

“Oh no you don’t! You can do that later, no way are you dropping a straight line like that and then leaving me hanging!” Solo objected, and Duo settled back into his chair. _Phew._

//Okay, okay. See, they haven’t quite got the idea about treecats, so--//

Solo managed to sign off about twenty minutes later using the excuse that Hilde would be calling soon to end the conversation naturally, hopefully without reminding Duo that he’d been planning to get more coffee. After closing the connection (and double-checking that he’d done so), he leaned back and nudged Loki gently. “He’s not doing so great, is he?” he said softly, and was answered with a headshake.

“He’s always had worse nightmares than me,” Solo went on after a pause, frowning. “We can’t nudge him out of them from here, and I guess Shinigami can’t bump him out of one alone if he can’t bring me into the link… damn. We’ll hit Reevesport in two days, and Duo’s going to have to be functional. Think he can hang on?”

Another headshake, more emphatic than the first.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so either.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETD: Estimated Time of Departure  
> Manapua: Hawaiian-style steamed pork buns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha_siu_bao  
> Jalebi: Fried dough squiggles soaked in syrup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalebi


End file.
